Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour today --
"If that [action against Assad] was done before, [the] Assad regime wouldn't be killing so many people, or pushing them to Turkey, Jordan, or Iraq or Lebanon. There wouldn't be any place or power vacuum for Daesh, for ISIS, to be active ... Assad lost this legitimacy long before; unfortunately, because of inactivity of international community, he continued his crimes, and he created a power vacuum -- he admitted this vacuum a few days ago -- and ISIS filled this vacuum. ... Eliminating ISIS is of course a strategic objective, but there should be some other elements .. We have to have a strategy about the future of Syria ... If there is one person who is responsible for all these terrorist crimes and humanitarian tragedies in Syria, it is Assad's approach, using chemical weapons, barrel bombs against civilians."
Four years after the first opportunity, there are now two genies out of the box: ISIS and Kurdish separatism in Syria. Just as the Obama administration has convinced itself that it can intervene against ISIS without helping Assad, it seems to have convinced itself that it can coax greater Turkish intervention against ISIS without putting the Kurdish question on the table too.
"If that [action against Assad] was done before, [the] Assad regime wouldn't be killing so many people, or pushing them to Turkey, Jordan, or Iraq or Lebanon. There wouldn't be any place or power vacuum for Daesh, for ISIS, to be active ... Assad lost this legitimacy long before; unfortunately, because of inactivity of international community, he continued his crimes, and he created a power vacuum -- he admitted this vacuum a few days ago -- and ISIS filled this vacuum. ... Eliminating ISIS is of course a strategic objective, but there should be some other elements .. We have to have a strategy about the future of Syria ... If there is one person who is responsible for all these terrorist crimes and humanitarian tragedies in Syria, it is Assad's approach, using chemical weapons, barrel bombs against civilians."
Four years after the first opportunity, there are now two genies out of the box: ISIS and Kurdish separatism in Syria. Just as the Obama administration has convinced itself that it can intervene against ISIS without helping Assad, it seems to have convinced itself that it can coax greater Turkish intervention against ISIS without putting the Kurdish question on the table too.
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