It now appears that menace may realize the goal set by the US and its Gulf Emirate allies to unseat the government of Syria and absorb the country into the ISIS Wahhabi Caliphate now gobbling up large swaths of Iraq and Syria.
Al Arabiya News reported on Tuesday Syrian airstrikes against ISIS in and around the ancient city of Palmyra have not stopped the advance of the terror army. ISIS took Palmyra last week.
Palmyra is strategically located. It provides access to military bases and gasfields in addition to highways leading to Damascus and the central city of Homs.
“ISIS has made further progress on the Tadmor-Damascus highway and grabbed the Khnaifess phosphate mines and nearby houses,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the Arab newspaper.
Reports by the organization, however, are considered suspect due to its association with anti-Assad activists.
Additionally, ISIS last week captured part of the industrial city Sheikh Najjar in Syria’s northern Aleppo province.
It has also taken control of the Iraqi-Syrian border gate of al-Waleed. It is the third border crossing to fall into ISIS’ hands over the last few weeks.
There are fears that Isis will now target the countryside ringing Damascus, Mr Assad’s seat of power. Known as the “Ghouta”, the rebel-held area has been under a regime blockade for nearly two years. Activists in Damascus and its environs have long worried about the potential for Isis sleeper cells within rebel ranks demoralized by the opposition’s inability to end the siege.
According to Syrian opposition activists, ISIS will not move on Damascus immediately, but will instead “go to the Ghouta and break the siege so it can gain the support of the people inside it.”
Analysts estimate ISIS now controls 50 percent of the country.
Infowars has argued from the outset that both al-Qaeda and ISIS are controlled assets of western intelligence designed specifically to sow destruction and chaos in the Middle East and also provide a pretext for a continuation and expansion of the war on terror.
In the short term, ISIS will be used to topple the government of Syria and convert the country into a failed state similar to the one created in Libya. Short of more direct support from Iran and Russia, al-Assad and the Syrian government cannot fend off ISIS indefinitely.
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