Washington and London Ignored Warnings about the ISIS Offensive in Iraq

 'As the Syrian civil war intensified, the Assad regime that ISIS was supposed to be fighting adopted a strategy that actually helped spur the group’s extraordinary rise. When ISIS started gaining strength—along with a reputation for beheadings, crucifixion and other barbarities—the manipulative Assad was careful not to target it. ISIS also turned its guns on other less radical rebel groups.
 Meanwhile, indirect assistance from the Assad regime came in many forms—from buying oil from ISIS-controlled wells in eastern Syria to relatively mild air strikes against ISIS compounds in contrast to the pounding other rebels suffered.
 At the start of the uprising against his regime, Assad released hundreds of jihadist detainees from Syrian jails, a move that has prompted moderate Syrian insurgents to charge that ISIS is in league with Damascus and that the terrorist organization was “regime-made” and “inserted into the body of the revolution,” all part of an effort to poison the insurgency and allow Assad to argue he was fighting extremists.
 As the Syrian civil war intensified, the Assad regime that ISIS was supposed to be fighting adopted a strategy that actually helped spur the group’s extraordinary rise. When ISIS started gaining strength—along with a reputation for beheadings, crucifixion and other barbarities—the manipulative Assad was careful not to target it. ISIS also turned its guns on other less radical rebel groups.
 The West fell deeper into the trap benefiting both ISIS and Assad by refraining from assisting the moderates “even when the latter confronted the increasingly powerful ISIS on the battlefield,” argues Murhaf Jouejati, a Mideast expert at the National Defense University.'