It’s been a rough week for Islamic State’s make-believe caliphate.

Word on Friday was that the United States military had killed the terrorist group’s second-in-command. In Iraq, government forces inched closer to the crucial ISIS-controlled city of Mosul. And in Syria, regime troops entered Palmyra, which Islamic State captured last year.

Palmyra’s liberation has been months in the making. The Syrian government started bombing ISIS positions there last September, but the black flag continued to fly, as much of the government’s attention remainedfocused on other targets like Aleppo. Bashar al-Assad’s strategy from the beginning has been to destroy rebels from groups like the Free Syrian Army first, as they control territory adjacent to him and are backed by many Western countries, including the United States. The Russian campaign in Syria, allegedly to fight terrorism, focused most of its firepower on the “moderate” rebels rather than ISIS.

This led many critics to assert that Assad was tolerating Islamic State and even working in conjunction with it. The linchpin of their claims is an alleged amnestygranted by Assad to 260 prisoners, many of whom were believed to be Islamists—a seeming attempt to bolster the jihadists and discredit the rebellion. If true, it was a cunning and destructive move by Assad, who’s always been good at self-preservation.

Still, the notion that Assad was integral to ISIS’s creation simply doesn’t add up. The real culprits are Al Qaeda in Iraq, Islamic State’s predecessor, and the wave of foreign fighters that’s swamped Syria since the civil war began, a hefty numberof whom come from Sunni states like Turkey, Jordan and, especially, Saudi Arabia. A poll from 2014 found that Saudis are the most receptive to Islamic State propaganda, and no wonder. The Saudi royal family has been incubating and manipulating extremist Wahhabist Islam for decades, now in an effort to counter Iranian power. This, more than anything else, planted the seeds for ISIS’s barbarism.

So while Assad has waged a ferocious and often indiscriminate war, there are forces in the Middle East far more sinister than his regime. Palmyra, once a crossroads of the ancient world, is a UNESCO World Heritage site that’s filled with ruins. Assad protected them; ISIS dynamited them, including the iconicBaalshamin Temple. There’s a pattern here: think of the Taliban exploding 1,700-year-old Buddhist statues or Saudi Wahhabists destroying the tomb ofHussein—Muhammad’s grandson and one of the holiest figures in the Shiite religion—back in the early nineteenth century.

So goes the Middle East. Some of our antagonists there believe in a degree of civilization; others are outright vandals. The United States is primarily at war with the latter. The reason so many of us were skeptical about arming the Syrian rebels back in 2013 is that we remembered what happened in Iraq, watched the extremists flooding over the borders and worried that a post-Assad Syria would end up a less stable and more dangerous place than an Assadist Syria. The rise of Islamic State confirmed our worst fears.

So it’s difficult not to join the UN in cheering the impending liberation of Palmyra, even if it’s being achieved by a devious dictatorship. Syria right now is a place of bad and worse choices, not easy binaries. Any peace there will come not through military victory, but through ongoing negotiations between the regime and the opposition in Geneva, nursed along by the United States and Russia. A political solution could result in a unity government or a partition of Syria. It could also (hopefully) phase out Assad himself. But the regime cannot be discounted or excluded from the diplomatic calculus, seeing as it still governs much of the country, and is regarded as the only legitimate seat of power by Alawites and many other western Syrians.

The West’s plan to win the war against Assad has proven to be folly. Now its concern should be to win the peace—and then take the fight to Islamic State where it belongs.

Matt Purple is a fellow at the American Security Initiative Foundation and deputy editor for Rare Politics.

Image: Flickr/Thierry Ehrmann

TEL AVIV – The deadly terrorist attacks in Brussels last week and in Paris last November are dress rehearsals for a coming “big” attack inside the United States, a leading Islamic State-allied militant claimed in an exclusive interview.

Abu al-Ayna al-Ansari, a Salafist movement senior official in the Gaza Strip, made the claim in a pre-recorded, hour-long interview to air in full on Sunday on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” the popular weekend talk radio program broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and NewsTalk 990 AM in Philadelphia. Klein doubles as Breitbart’ssenior investigative reporter and Jerusalem bureau chief.

Ansari is a well-known Gazan Salafist jihadist allied with Islamic State ideology. During the interview with Klein, Ansari seemed to be speaking as an actual IS member, repeatedly using the pronoun “we” when referring to IS and even seemingly making declarations on behalf of IS.

IS has been reluctant to officially declare its presence in Gaza for fear of a Hamas clampdown, but the group is known to be active in the coastal enclave and Ansari is a suspected IS leader. IS-aligned militants have taken responsibility for recent rocket fire from Gaza aimed at Israel.

Klein asked Ansari whether IS maintains cells inside the U.S. and if the terrorist group is “planning anything in America.”

Ansari responded:

Aaron, the battle with America is a very long one, a very tough one, a very hard one. America has a black record with the mujahedeen, and this black record will not be purified but with blood, and lots of blood. Only blood will cleanse what America did to the mujahedeen. And I can confirm that our leadership made it very clear that what happened in Paris, what happened in Brussels was only a small rehearsal before the big thing that will happen in America.

This is the commitment; this is the engagement of our leadership to the mujahedeen. I cannot give details and the truth is that I don’t know the small details – how many agents we have and where we have them. This depends on our leaders, the Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the general military commander, Abu Omar al-Shishani. They will decide when and where to strike in the United States.

But I can tell you that when we are in touch with our different components, with the leaders of the Islamic State. They confirm, they make it very sure and very clear that it is only a question of time when there will be a strike in America. And as I said before, what you saw in Paris, what you saw in Brussels will be only a small rehearsal in comparison with what will happen in the United States.

Ansari’s reference to senior Islamic State commander Abu Omar al-Shishani as alive and active comes after the Pentagon announced earlier this month that a U.S. airstrike on March 4 near al-Shaddadi, Syria targeted al-Shishani. The Pentagon did not make an official statement about whether al-Shashani was killed in the strike, but it told reporters on background that he was “likely killed.” IS has denied that Shishani was killed.

(BREITBART)