President Barack Obama appears to be leaning towards allowing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to stay in power as part of a political transition, Josh Rogin of Bloomberg View reported on Monday.

Despite statements by Secretary of State John Kerry that Assad supports ISIS and that his relationship with the terror group is “symbiotic,” Rogin observed that Obama appears to be leaning towards other advisors who feel that confronting ISIS should take priority over removing Assad.

Rogin noted that, in recent statements, Kerry and National Security Advisor Susan Rice both pressed for Assad’s ouster. He added that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also called for Assad’s removal in a speech at the Brookings Institution on Sunday.

However, Rogin observed that Obama never mentioned Assad during a Sunday night speech in which the president pledged to fight ISIS. Moreover, Rogin argued that the administration’s thinking was “almost certainly” reflected in a memo released Monday by former presidential advisor Philip Gordon, which claimed that more pressure on Assad “will not work” and that seeking to dislodge Assad “has led only to a military stalemate that is benefiting the extreme elements of the opposition, including the Islamic State.”

The administration’s apparent tilt towards allowing Assad to stay in power comes as analysts are increasingly pointing to evidence that the Syrian dictator supports ISIS.

David Blair, the chief foreign correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, wrote on Monday that despite Assad’s support of ISIS, the Syrian dictator was attempting “to convince the West to accept him as an essential bulwark against the very threat he helped to conjure into being.”

Similarly, last month, Rogin wrote that Assad’s strategy of strengthening ISIS in order to construct a false choice between him and the terror group was working, and noted that the attention paid to ISIS in the wake of the Paris terror attacks was “taking the pressure off the Syrian regime right at the moment when pressure might have been effective.”

Iran, Assad’s leading financial and military backer, has also helped engineer the terror group’s creation and growth.

Last month, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh wrote that Iran has not attempted to roll back ISIS’s territorial gains, and observed that sectarian violence in Syria and Iraq allowed Tehran to achieve “more influence than at any time since the 1979 revolution.” Similarly, in May, former U.S. military intelligence officer Michael Pregent explained that Iran and its allied militias did not extend themselves to fight ISIS, and concluded that “Iran needs the threat of ISIS and Sunni jihadist groups to stay in Syria and Iraq in order to become further entrenched in Damascus and Baghdad.”

In late 2014, reports surfaced that Iranian agents were transferring weapons to ISIS in exchange for oil. The allegations came two years after the U.S. Treasury Department exposed Iranian funding of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the terrorist organization that later evolved into ISIS.

In Iran Is More Deeply Tied To ISIS Than You Think, which was published in the December 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, Benjamin Decker explained how heavy Iranian support helped fuel the rise of AQI.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the predecessor to the Islamic State, has been well documented; comparably little attention has been given to the group’s global reach. While the Islamic State was born out of Osama Bin Laden’s global jihad against the West, many overlook the importance of another player in the equation – Iran.

This may seem surprising given that Iran, the stalwart of the Shi’a Crescent, is currently embroiled in a regional war against the Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq. However, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, described as one of the “largest and most dynamic intelligence agencies in the Middle East” by the Pentagon’s Irregular Warfare Support Program, has, over the past 20 years, provided financial, material, technological, and other support services to AQI. The man responsible for fostering this unexpected relationship was Imad Mughniyeh. While his name may not carry the same perceived significance as Osama Bin Laden, Mughniyeh commanded a vast international terror network that included Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and a myriad of others, spanning over five continents.

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