Special to WorldTribune.com

Hillary Clinton’s idea for a no-fly zone in Syria “would not solve the ISIL problem,” a White House official said.

The no-fly zone proposed by Democratic presidential front-runner and former secretary of state would be ineffective and a poor use of resources, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said on David Axelrod’s CNN podcast “The Axe Files”.

In a debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders on April 14, Clinton said she still supports a no-fly zone “because I think we need to put in safe havens for those poor Syrians who are fleeing both Assad and ISIL and so they have some place they can be safe.”

Rhodes contended that “if you had an area of geography in Syria where planes couldn’t fly over it, people would still be killing each other on the ground. ISIL doesn’t have planes, so that doesn’t solve the ISIL problem. They would still be able to massacre people on the ground. And we would have to devote an enormous amount of our resources – which are currently devoted to finding ISIL and killing them wherever they are – to maintaining this no-fly zone. So it’s just not a good use of resources.”

In the podcast, Rhodes reiterated the Obama administration’s opposition to Clinton’s stance:

“The fact is we have the ability to target them and to bomb them already. A no fly zone might create some additional ability to manage some of the refugee flows and brush back some of the Syrian regime’s air attacks on civilians, but frankly that violence could just manifest itself in different ways on the ground or migrate to different areas.”