US Expands Syria Strikes: Not Just a War Against ISIS

September 30th, 2014

David Schulberg

US airstrikes seem to be expanding in scope today in Syria, with four different provinces of the country hit in attacks, including areas where ISIS is virtually non-existent.

President Obama has been insisting it is an oversimplification to say this war is America versus ISIS. Indeed, that’s the case, but while the president is seeking to downplay the scope of the conflict, the signs are that he’s at war with actually a much broader swath of the Syrian rebellion.

Jabhat al-Nusra, one of the other rebel factions that has found itself unofficially a target of the US air war, through the attacks on the non-existent Khorasan faction (which is really just Nusra), slammed the US strikes as a full scale “war against Islam.”

That is an overstatement, of course, but as the US strikes escalate, and the targets span more and more of rebel-held Syria, the more extreme factions of the Syrian rebellion are going to increasingly see this as not a US war against ISIS, but a US war against the rebellion in general.