The White House said last week that the U.S. is "at war" with some 31,000 ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq, and will build an international coalition to defeat the radical Islamist group. One of the biggest champions of this new military campaign is Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has been fighting rebels in a bloody civil war sparked by the Arab Spring in 2011. But Assad is largely responsible for ISIS' rise in the first place. In a gamble, he allowed them to obliterate moderate rebels so he could show the world he was fighting terrorists, not citizens calling for democracy. Now ISIS is so big it's a threat to his regime and so he's asking the U.S. to work with him to defeat the beast he helped create.
