On a leaked tape, John Kerry admits the US watched ISIS grow and thought the US could manage ISIS. The US was hoping ISIS would be a problem for Assad.
Last fall Secretary of State Kerry met privately with anti-Assad Syrian activists at the U.N. The meeting was secretly taped, and you can listen to the tape here:
The New York Times got a hold of the tape back in September and wrote a story about it. So did CNN. More on their accounts later.
The thrust of the conversation was the mutual frustration of Kerry and the Syrians that Bashar al-Assad was still in power and able to commit atrocities with the support of the Russians, who don’t adhere to international law the way we Americans do. I’d recommend listening to the whole tape; but the conversation went something like this:
The Syrians complained we aren’t helping enough. Kerry and his associates said we and the Saudis and Qatar and Turkey had provided huge amounts of aid to the rebels, who unfortunately were sort of aligned with extremists.
“Nusra makes it hard,” Kerry said, referring to Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. “Nusra and Daesh [ISIS] both make it hard, because you have this extreme element out there and unfortunately some of the opposition has kind of chosen to work with them.”
The rise of extremists had led to Russia’s intervention. Kerry said (at minute 26) that when Daesh, or ISIS, started to grow, the US watched and thought we could “manage” the ISIS situation, because it might push Assad to negotiate, but instead Putin came in. Kerry:
“The reason Russia came in is because ISIL was getting stronger, Daesh was threatening the possibility of going to Damascus and so forth. And that’s why Russia went in. Because they didn’t want a Daesh government and they supported Assad.
“And we know that this was growing. We were watching. We saw that Daesh was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened. We thought, however, we could probably manage, that Assad would then negotiate. Instead of negotiating, he got Putin to support him.”