Trump Can’t Make Assad Go
Syria’s dictator won’t bow to American pressure. He’ll burn the country to the ground first.
Article/Op-Ed in Politico
Wojtek Ogrodowczyk / Flickr
April 12, 2017
Barak Barfi wrote for Politico about President Trump and Syrian President Bashar Assad:
When I met Syrian President Bashar Assad on the eve of the American presidential election, I asked him what he would do to demonstrate to the next president that he could be a potential ally in the fight against the Islamic State.
He scoffed at my suggestion. “The whole argument [is] based on the facts that the United States wants to fight ISIS,” he said, using the common acronym for the terrorist group. “But this is not fact,” he went on. “This is illusion … And this is misinformation. In reality, everything the United States has been doing in Syria, at least since what they call the international alliance or coalition against ISIS was, is to expand ISIS.”