The latest assessment of the Institute for the Study of War says it all — ISIS is advancing as a result of Russian airstrikes against their rival rebel groups which were provided with weapons by the United States and its allies:

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ISW concludes that Russia’s airstrikes are designed to aid a push by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), which is aided by Iranian and Hezbollah ground troops. Furthermore, ISIS is taking advantage of the weakened rebel positions and is itself advancing near Aleppo: Russia’s involvement in Syria is facilitating ISIS’s territorial gains, while also strengthening Assad. Russia is supporting the Syrian regime’s offensives in Latakia, the al-Ghab Plain, and northern Hama. Russia also intensified strikes on rebel-held northwestern Aleppo, likely to set conditions for an imminent Russian-Iranian-Syrian regime offensive in the area. U.S. defense officials and local Syrian activists reported the arrival of hundreds of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-Quds Force fighters and other Iranian proxy forces in Aleppo over the past few days. Russian strikes largely concentrated along the rebel-held supply route leading to the besieged regime enclaves of Nubl and Zahraa northwest of Aleppo City. If the regime can link with these enclaves, they will successfully sever the rebel-held supply route from Aleppo City to the Turkish border. Simultaneous regime offensives in both Hama and Aleppo Provinces will likely fix rebel forces along multiple fronts and prevent them from reinforcing their positions across northwestern Syria, resulting in a loss of terrain for the Syrian opposition. Read their entire assessment here. This is exactly what many experts, including those at The Interpreter, predicted would happen. Recently The Interpreter’s editor-in-chief Michael Weiss was interviewed by Reason magazine. Weiss pointed out that expert analysis of the situation in Syria has long been ignored by policy makers and the situation there is now both precarious and hard to fix:

Even former members of the Obama administration are speaking out against US policy now. Frederic Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East and a former special advisor for transition in Syria at the U.S. Department of State, has written a piece in Politico about the crisis.

POLITICO Magazine

I Got Syria So Wrong Now and then I am asked if I had predicted, way back in March 2011 when violence in Syria began, that within a few years a quarter-million people would be dead, half the population homeless and hundreds of thousands of defenseless civilians terrorized, traumatized, tortured and starved. View full page →