In an op-ed published in The New York Daily News on Thursday, Matthew Levitt, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), argued that the United States must step up its military attacks against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) if it hopes to defeat the terrorist group.

While acknowledging that “[t]here are risks” to escalating the war against ISIS, Levitt writes:

The U.S. cannot rely simply on military advisers to the Iraqi Army, an Iraqi political agreement, and a few air strikes here and there. Nor can it stop at the Iraq-Syria border because ISIS certainly does not. Destroying ISIS will only happen if it is hit hard in both northern Iraq and eastern Syria.

Yet the U.S. should not give Syrian President Bashar Assad a free pass while it takes out his enemies. Officials repeat that in Syria, the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend. The government needs to stand by that, and it has low-risk options.

Levitt further asserts that hitting a number of Assad’s military airfields will greatly hamper his ability to wage continued war. By hitting both ISIS and Assad, the West would gain extra time “to help arm and train moderates.”

A Thursday editorial in The Washington Post concerning President Barack Obama’s foreign policy advocated a similar strategy:

Easy answers don’t exist, but Mr. Obama ought to be guided by several principles. One is that the terrorist threat can be neutralized only by combating all of the forces destroying the region: That includes Assad’s criminal army as well as Iranian-backed Shiite militias. Fostering a representative and non-sectarian government must be the aim in Syria as well as Iraq. But political breakthroughs should not be a precondition for military measures. On the contrary: The starting point for achieving those political goals is providing the region’s beleaguered moderate forces — which include the government and militia of Iraqi Kurdistan and the Free Syrian Army — the substantial and sustained support they need to fight their enemies on an equal footing.

In Yes, We Really Can Stop the Slaughter in Syria, published in the March 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Brooklyn Middleton wrote presciently that “under current conditions, Syria could become a base for al Qaeda-affiliated or -inspired jihadists in the area of the country it controls.”

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