While the violence in Syria rages, we on the Western side of the world are still trying to understand exactly what’s happening.
King’s University College was host to a talk that took a deeper look into the factors affecting the crisis.
“If we took a survey of Western media we’d be led to believe ISIS is the main cause of the crisis in Syria, but that’s just not true,” says Associate Professor at Arcadia University and speaker of the talk Samer Abboud.
Abboud says ISIS is just one of the thousands of groups that have grown out of the problems in the country, and although they are strongly ideological, this is not an ideological war.
“It’s more material and economic, not ideological. There is no single defining ideology holding these groups together. Taking ISIS as the main driver of this crisis is too simplistic, there’s much more going on beneath the surface that we just don’t know, or aren’t aware of.”
Abboud adds many seem to think it’s a choice between the regime and ISIS, but if we focus on eliminating ISIS we would be left with a regime that has done nothing but inflict terror on it’s citizens for more than four years.
