NEW YORK, September 8 (RIA Novosti) – The United States will struggle to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria without offering self-rule to the region’s oppressed Sunni Muslims, Oklahoma University professor Joshua Landis told RIA Novosti.
“It's easy to get a bunch of Europeans to agree that ISIS is bad and to send arms to the region. But developing a strategy about how to replace ISIS with some kind of political arrangement that will satisfy Sunni demands for self-rule or self-determination is hard to envisage at this point,” Landis said.
“ISIS has no friends, except for this severe sense of injustice that lives in the hearts of the Sunnis who populate this giant swathe of territory. As long as the West cannot answer that deep sense of injustice and persecution, ISIS will survive in the same way that Hamas survives in Gaza. No matter how much you bomb, you cannot erase people’s desire for self-determination and justice,” the professor said.
The Islamic State – which has also been called ISIS and ISIL – has seized swathes of territory and declared a caliphate across about half of Iraq and Syria that is home to some 6 million people. On Wednesday, US president Barack Obama is set to unveil his plan for defeating the Islamists.
