Take Your Pick

"The Syrian opposition fully supports a comprehensive U.S.-led campaign to launch military strikes in Syria against the Islamic State terrorist army and al-Qaeda affiliates.
"Assad was a key ingredient in the rise of the Islamic State. He and his regime turned Syria into a launching pad for terrorism over the years and fostered the environment in which transnational terrorist forces grew in the country."
Oubai Shahbandar, Washington-based adviser to the Free Syria foreign mission

"I am no apologist for the Assad regime. But in terms of our security, ISIS is by far the largest threat."
Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Syria

"Washington also needs to consider how best to protect the American population."
Professor Max Abrahms, terror analyst, Northeastern University

Ammunition: A Syrian rebel fighter loads an anti-aircraft machine-gun on an armoured vehicle in the northern town of Atareb, 25km east of Aleppo

Syria has been making overtures to the United States, to continue to view it as a partner in the battle against raging Islamist jihad. To reconsider their former ties and reject the unfortunate misunderstandings that have led to a frosty period of estrangement and blame between the U.S. administration and the Alawite Baathist regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Make up, and all will be forgiven in their joint desire to counter the ISIS advance. Belated on both their accounts.

And a line of thought has indeed been circulating within the United States where there are those who feel the U.S. should hold its nose and ally itself with the regime for the greater purpose of fighting the Islamic State. On the other hand, considering the horrible atrocities that the regime has visited on its Sunni Syrian population over the past three years, from chemical attacks, to helicopter gunships strafing civilian enclaves, to barrel bombs and chlorine gas attacks, arrests, torture, rape and slaughter the impulse is to gag.

No one doubts that Bashar al-Assad is directly behind all the atrocities that his regime instructs the Syrian military to commit, including its alliance with the terrorist group Hezbollah, with Iran inciting them to have no mercy on the Sunni insurgents. So these would be strange bedfellows indeed for a U.S.-Syrian alliance with the common goal of defeating the Sunni-led Islamist State jihadis who have committed atrocities equally monstrous and often chillingly greater to that of the regime.

Which beast better to be allied with? The Syrian regime has warned the U.S. that it will not countenance the freedom given it by the government in Baghdad to conduct air strikes on ISIS forces in Iraq. Any entry by American war planes into Syrian space will be viewed, they warn, as a strategy of war against Syria and the Syrian response will correspond to that situation accordingly. The regime will not abide by the insult of unilateral strikes in its airspace, but see it as naked "aggression".

Struggling with the potential of proffering greater aid to the Syrian Sunni Free Army, which the U.S. declined to deal with at an early stage when Islamist infiltration was in its infancy, is another choice, but one viewed with grave suspicion with the certain knowledge that any weapons supplied to the Free Syrian Army will filter through eventually to al-Qaeda militias, leaving the stark choice of whom to concentrate on: al-Qaeda or ISIS