Will US Congress bring the ISIS fight to Syria? US Capitol building. Illustrative. By Joshua Spurlock
The United States has so far chosen not to get involved in the Syrian civil war with direct military strikes, but that could change thanks to the extremist ISIS terror group. While the US still doesn’t sound likely to use military force to pick sides in Syria, the ISIS terrorists are a bigger threat to the US, and their base of operations spans both Iraq and Syria.
One US lawmaker, Senator Bill Nelson, is proposing legislation that would give President Barack Obama a tacit green light to strike ISIS in Syria. “This will ensure there’s no question that the president has the legal authority he needs to use airstrikes in Syria,” Nelson said in a press release. “Let there be no doubt, we must go after ISIS right away because the US is the only one that can put together a coalition to stop this group that’s intent on barbaric cruelty.”
Such legislation, if passed, would remove the legal questions surrounding whether or not Obama can bomb ISIS in Syria without Congressional approval. The lack of Congressional support has already been a key reason why the US has yet to get involved in Syria.
Last year, Obama looked to Congress online pharmacy for klonopin ahead of possible air strikes in Syria against the regime there after it used chemical weapons on its own people, but a wave of anti-war sentiment in the US legislature helped close the door to those plans. Eventually, a deal was reached in which the Syrian regime pledged to dispose of its chemical weapons.
Meanwhile, despite the threat of ISIS in Syria and the fact that ISIS is fighting the regime there, the US is still critiquing the Syrian regime in the ongoing civil war in the country. Citing reports of hundreds of rockets hitting a Damascus neighborhood in the last week, US spokesperson Jen Psaki slammed the regime for “de facto carpet bombing” the area.
“It is not only [ISIS] targeting innocent civilians in Syria. It is also the regime,” said Psaki in comments released by the State Department. “As the international community works to counter the threat of [ISIS], the regime is targeting communities that are also confronting the danger of [ISIS] and other extremist groups. We condemn in the strongest terms the Syrian regime’s indiscriminate bombing of a densely populated neighborhood in Damascus.”
Psaki said that despite efforts to build an international coalition to stop ISIS, the US is not looking to include the Syrian regime in that effort.
(By Joshua Spurlock, www.themideastupdate.com, September 3, 2014)