LATEST: Obama — There Are Few “Moderates” For US to Help in Short-Term
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An audio statement by the leader of the Islamist faction Jabhat al-Nusra on Sunday night highlighted the possibility that US airstrikes — far from achieving President Obama’s stated goal to “degrade and eventually destroy” the Islamic State — have bolstered the extremists.
Abu Mohammad al-Joulani made his first statement since US missiles killed at least 60 Jabhat al-Nusra members last Tuesday in attacks on two locations in Aleppo and Idlib Provinces.
He effectively called for the Syrian opposition and insurgency to rally against both the Islamic State and the West, claiming that the US had sought from the start of the Syrian uprising in March 2011 to “abort” the campaign.
Abu Joulani denounced the opposition Syrian National Coalition as “Western agents applying the Western agenda” and called for the ascendancy of “the Islam of jihad, the Islam of Mohammad”.
The Jabhat al-Nusra leader said that if the West stopped its “aggression” against Muslims, “You’ll be safe from jihadists.”
However, he warned Washington that its aerial intervention had stirred an “earthquake” of the Syrian people, which would oppose the US-led coalition.
Despite al-Joulani’s avoidance of any reconciliation with the Islamic State — from whom Jabhat al-Nusra split in April 2013 in a dispute over leadership of the jihadist movement in Syria — at least one report pointed to the possibility. A “senior source” told the Guardian newspaper that some Jabhat al-Nusra fighters were discussing war plans with Islamic State counterparts.
Obama: There Are Few “Moderates” For US to Help in Short-Term
In his nationally-televised interview on Sunday night, President Obama effectively said there are few “moderates” on the ground who can effectively be helped in the short-term by the US:
There is a moderate Syrian opposition, but right now, it doesn’t control much territory. They are being squeezed between ISIL [the Islamic State] on the one hand and the Assad regime on the other.
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He spoke of “the mythology that, if somehow we had given those folks guns 2 1/2 years ago, then somehow Syria would be fine:
For us to start arming inexperienced fighters we hadn’t vetted…would have been counter-productive and would not have helped the situation, but would also have committed us to a more significant role in Syria.
He said he recognized the “contradiction” of saying in the past that he wanted to get rid of Assad and in the present attacking Assad’s “most dangerous opponent” in the Islamic State — while leaving the regime alone. He repeated that Assad could not oversee a political transition but that the Islamic State and the mysterious “Khorasan Group” were “a more immediate concern”.
