NEW YORK, October 1 (RIA Novosti) – By teaming up with Saudi Arabia and other reactionary governments, the US-led campaign against Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria and Iraq could create more extremism in the region, James Dorsey, a scholar at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University told RIA Novosti.
"The US is reverting to a misguided policy that has spawned more virulent forms of militant Islam, and is thus sowing the seeds of more extremist groups," Dorsey said.
The scholar added that the US-led response is more extensive and fraught with danger than the war on terror that followed 9/11.
"The policy focuses on military rather than political solutions and promotes status quo regimes whose autocracy chokes off opportunities for the venting of wide-spread discontent and anger, leaving violence and extremism as one of the few, if not the only, option to force change," Dorsey concluded.
The US has teamed up with Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Gulf countries to launch strikes on IS, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL, a sectarian Sunni Muslim militia of more than 30,000 fighters that controls swathes of Sunni-majority areas on either side of the Iraq-Syria border.
US President Barack Obama says IS can be routed by US-led airstrikes and bolstering Kurds, Iraqis and moderate elements of Syria's opposition as ground forces. Critics say he lacks reliable allies, is over-reliant on air-power and has no strategy for ending Syria's civil war.
