Sowing bad US policy from Iraq to Syria

The US is further complicating the turmoil in Iraq by ramping up support for terrorists and militants in Syria, two political authors say.

In a recent article published on Huffington Post, Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett said the tensions in Iraq and Syria are interwoven, arguing that Washington’s empowering of “brutal and unrepresentative militias” in Syria has fed the violence in neighboring Iraq.

The authors said the US, for over three years, provided militants in Syria with different types of aid, creating a chaos that plagued the Arab country and spilled over into Iraq.

The US President Barack Obama administration’s transformation of Syria into a “training ground” for transnational Takfiri militants has “directly” led to the resurgence of extremism in Iraq, they said.

The terrorist group of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which is currently carrying out terror acts in Iraq, was on the ropes at the outset of the Syria conflict, they wrote, but it was reinvigorated through the “creation of an externally supported insurgency in Syria by the United States and America’s European and regional partners.”

“Unfortunately, Washington seems determined to compound its appalling policy choices in Iraq with equally grievous choices regarding Syria,” they added.

The authors said that solely the US and its allies, who collaborated in creating Syria crisis, are to blame for the current tension in Iraq, stressing that the spread of Washington’s bad policy from Iraq to Syria and back again has resulted in irreversibly “horrific damage.”

Iraqi forces are continuing their battle against the ISIL Takfiri terrorist group, as militants are advancing in Iraq, taking control of parts of the Arab country.

Syria has been also gripped by deadly violence since March 2011. The crisis in Syria is supported by Western powers and their regional allies.