The way to start turning this around is to help the local partners who worked with us to defeat ISIS to take the next step and consolidate their hold of the territory they liberated in northeastern Syria, those areas have important oil and gas assets, which Assad wants to control. If our partners hold them, it would be the most important card in our hand at the negotiating table.

David Adesnik

Categorized in : Latest Headlines

The role of NSA surveillance -- that has been questioned as something that might infringe on our own freedom of speech, but I think this attack underlines that the real threat to freedom of speech are the terrorists, they are murdering cartoonists and journalists, usually attacks go forward and are carried out due to a lack of human intelligence or a lack of tactical analysis … and that was the failure point in pretty much every terror attack I investigated.

These are two faces of precisely the same conflict, same threat. It’s not that there is one terrorist threat to Europe or other Western places, then a different threat that ISIS and other groups present in the Middle East.