US Airstrikes Will Not Defeat ISIL

Tehran, Aug 27, IRNA - ˈKayhan Internationalˈ on Wednesday vehemently criticized Washingtonˈs plans to expand the Iraq air war into Syria. If US and its allies are truly sincere in their so-called ˈhumanitarian intervention” to save Iraq (and Syria) they must first stop regimenting, schooling, training, logistically helping and weaponizing the criminal ISIL thugs in places like Turkey and Jordan, underlined the English-language paper in its Viewpoint column. Eventually, the US is expected to begin attacks of its own inside of Syria, but the problem of coordinating with the Syrian government so soon after trying to sell the world public on invading Syria to oust President Bashar al-Assad remains unresolved, noted the daily. Simultaneously, the Syrian government says they would not accept unilateral US attacks outside of a coordination deal, and would view them as an act of aggression, it added. Unquestioningly, it is very unlikely that US airstrikes will be able to stop the march of the self-styled Islamic Caliphate of Iraq and the Levant across Syria and Iraq, believed the daily adding that the brutal ISIL beheaders are playing a kind of territorial land battle. They are not going to be stopped by airstrikes, reminded the paper adding that one tactical mission can be halted, then they will redirect. A military defeat of ISIL will come only through the use of force on the ground but it must come through Kurdish-Iraqi- Syrian forces, suggested the paper. Another mistaken view pushed by Washington is that the ˈISILˈ is the child of the Syrian war, decried the paper. US officials want to deny the fact that ISIL is indeed a child of America. In fact, the ISIL and other Al-Qaeda offshoots have their roots in the destruction of the Iraqi state by the American invasion in 2003 - not to mention the US-made destructions in Afghanistan and Syria. In light of the above, the paper predicted that, evidently, Syria is just the next stop in America’s ˈhumanitarian” reinvasion of the region. Without question, the Pentagon’s push for an escalation in Iraq (the country where ISIL got their start after the US-led invasion of 2003) is an open-ended war with ever expanding goals and boundaries, much larger than anyone bargained for, it pointed out. All this suggests that the old ˈshock and aweˈ prescription wonˈt work. The West needs to disengage and step back from the morass of state disintegration in the Middle East. ISIL came in Syria on the back of the war in which Israel, Arab and Western governments supported the Takfiri terrorists against President Assad, thus helping to undermine a strong state, concluded the paper.