Both Iraq and Syria are a fissile mixture of ethnicities and religions thrown together after Versailles by departing French and British imperialists and only kept together by Baathist tyranny and violence.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Syria is geographically and politically in the middle of the Middle East.
Syria should not belong to one family, to one coterie, or to one party. It belongs to all the people of Syria equally, in all their religious and ethnic diversity.
It's astounding the degree to which these communities are intermarried. Iraq is a crazy quilt of ethnicities and religious sects.
Both sides in Syria are bad. One side is a brutal dictator, and the other includes Islamists and terrorists who are dangerous already and who would be brutal in power if given the chance.
The issue with Syria, I think for many of us, has always been about Iran. This is an anchor point for them in terms of regional domination. It means a lot to them. They are all in here.
Syria and Iran have always had a pretty tight relationship, and it looks to me like they just cooked up a press release to put out to sort of restate the obvious. They're both problem countries; we know that. And this doesn't change anything.
For many foreign fighters, the jihad in Iraq and Syria is a commuter war.
ISIS is in many ways a creation of the Syrian regime.
Syria is attracting a lot more Westerners than the Iraq War ever did because it's the perfect Sunni jihad.
Syria is the proud heir of an ancient civilization that has a unique spectrum of minorities that encompasses Muslims and Christians of various denominations. There are at least ten such ethnic and religious groups.