ISIS Crisis: A Powerless US And ‘˜Without Strategy’ Obama

Remember Russian President Vladimir Putin’s open letter to US President Barack Obama in New York Times last year? In the op-ed, which had become a full fledged front page news, Putin had appealed to Obama to resist the military strikes against Syria.

By saying that “Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multi-religious country,”‘ and that there are more “Qaeda fighters” that “champions of democracy” Putin had charged US of making the situation more bloody by supplying weapons to the opposition. The opposition, he had pointed out, has deep links with al-Qaeda which may risk exposing Syria to extremism.

And even when Putin is himself combating with the Ukraine crisis, he stands vindicated today.

According to the Guardian, Obama said on Thursday that he has not yet developed a strategy to combat Islamic State (Isis) militants, months after the jihadist army erased the border between Iraq and Syria and more than a week after it beheaded an American citizen.

“I don’t want to put the cart before the horse: we don’t have a strategy yet,” Time quoted Obama telling reporters at the White House, indicating a reluctance to expand his bombing campaign into Syria.

The Syrian crisis is blowing out of proportion. Islamic State (IS) has released a video appearing to show the beheading of a Kurdish man as a warning to forces fighting the group in northern Iraq. The video, entitled a Message in Blood, shows several men in orange jumpsuits said to be captured Kurdish fighters.

The victim is then seen kneeling near a mosque in the IS-held city of Mosul before he is beheaded. The jihadists have warned that others will be killed if Kurdish leaders continue to back the US.Kurdish “peshmerga” fighters from the autonomous Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq have been trying to counter an advance by IS, backed by US air strikes.

Earlier, IS videos from Syria appeared to show the mass killing of Syrian soldiers taken prisoner after their base was overrun. Activist group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the soldiers had been captured while trying to flee to Hama province after IS stormed the Tabqa airbase. The Sunni militant group has declared a “caliphate” across the parts of Syria and Iraq that it controls.

Last week, IS drew worldwide condemnation after releasing a video showing the beheading of US journalist James Foley. It said his death was in retaliation for US air strikes in Iraq, and the jihadist group threatened to kill other US hostages.

Perhaps, we should stop calling US a superpower and stop looking up to it.