Two nights ago, we bombed ISIS. <\/p>\n
We didn’t just bomb ISIS though, we also bombed a separate group, the Khorasan Group, which might, or not be affiliated with abhat al-Nusra.<\/p>\n
The kicker is that Khorasan Group and ISIS are enemies<\/a>, which means that we are bombing two opposing sides of the Syrian civil war:<\/p>\n On Monday night, the United States struck<\/a> targets in Syria for the first time as part of its expanded air campaign against ISIS\u2014a campaign that had previously been limited to the Iraqi side of the terrorist group’s border-spanning domain<\/a>. But the anti-ISIS mission Barack Obama outlined<\/a> in an address on September 10\u2014”We will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL”\u2014had expanded in another way, too, as the U.S. launched strikes on a separate group in Syria that many Americans hadn’t heard of until recently<\/a>. The Khorasan Group, which the president introduced<\/a> briefly on Tuesday morning as “seasoned al-Qaeda operatives in Syria,” appears to be part of a faction that is actively fighting ISIS, meaning America has now bombed two opposing sides of Syria’s many-sided civil war. Has the military operation announced by the president only weeks ago already outgrown its original mission? <\/p>\n The Khorasan Group made no appearance in Obama’s speech warning Americans that U.S. airstrikes in Syria were likely. And it’s unclear what the group’s exact relationship is to al-Qaeda’s better-known affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, or even whether it’s a distinct entity<\/a>. Regardless, al-Qaeda’s international leadership has disowned<\/a> ISIS, and at the local level, forces associated with al-Qaeda have fought<\/a> the group for territory. ISIS, for its part, has been blamed for<\/a> assassinating senior al-Qaeda figures in Syria.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n On the night that “kinetic action” began, we bombed two sides in a conflict. (To be fair, there are 3\u00bc sides in the Syrian civil war, ISIS on one side, Sunni Jihadis on the other side, the Damascus regime on yet another side, and then the “Free Syrian Army”, whom I count as \u00bc of a side)<\/p>\n And need I mention, the Sunni Jihadis, one of the sides that we just bombed, will be trained by the American military in Saudi Arabia, but we’re going to be really<\/b> careful not to train the really<\/b> bad ones.<\/p>\n This is so transparently a complete cluster f%$# that it positively buggers the mind, and we are not even a week into this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two nights ago, we bombed ISIS. We didn’t just bomb ISIS though, we also bombed a separate group, the Khorasan Group, which might, or not be affiliated with abhat al-Nusra. The kicker is that Khorasan Group and ISIS are enemies, which means that we are bombing two opposing sides of the Syrian civil war: On …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[981,1031,1034,1063,986,982,1076],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-war","category-house-of-saud","category-iran","category-iraq","category-middle-east","category-stupid","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185625\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}