US pursuing wrong-headed strategy against ISIL: Analyst
An American political commentator says the United States is pursuing a wrong-headed strategy against the ISIL terrorist group.
William Jones, the Washington bureau chief for the weekly newsmagazine Executive Intelligence Review, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Monday.
He was commenting on a recent report which said dozens of volunteer fighters battling ISIL militants were killed in US airstrikes in Iraq.
Iraqi security sources said on Monday that US fighter jets targeted the positions of fighters on the outskirts of the city of al-Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad.
“When the US is launching these bombing campaigns, it’s not always that they hit the right targets. And it’s not always the case that they are going after those who they say they are going after. This is a very complicated situation,” Jones said.
“Basically, the whole idea of the strategy is wrong-headed since you are not going to defeat a force like ISIL simply through air power, that has been proven throughout history,” he added.
Jones went on to say that the US has to coordinate “carefully” its policy “with the leadership in the region, both in terms of the military strategy and in terms of what specific role the US air force would have.”
“Obviously this coordination is somewhat lacking if it exists at all,” he noted.
Since late September, the US and some of its Arab allies — Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates — have been conducting airstrikes against ISIL inside Syria without any authorization from Damascus or a UN mandate.
Some analysts have long maintained that the United States and its allies have seized on the ISIL threat to target the Syrian government. The US and its allies have been accused of funding and arming the insurgency in Syria.
US warplanes have also conducted hundreds of strikes against ISIL in Iraq since mid-August. Some Western states have also participated in some of the airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq.
