Online published on 19 July, 2016.
The long-standing American policy of fighting leftist or nonaligned regimes in the Middle East through radical Islamist insurgencies has had disastrous consequences, one of the more recent being the rise of ISIS-Daesh (the Islamic state), which has endeavoured to conquer Iraq, Syria and other countries and bring them under a fundamentalist Sunni Caliphate. The US's tactic of playing Sunnis and Shiites against each other has exacerbated old divisions and led to a wider sectarian and strategic conflict across the region. This paper observes that the West now seems confused and unwilling to play a decisive role in the expanding war, which can only be settled through the mediation of the major powers.
