Breaking News

[Svejk]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-29321136

[Svejk]

Not a lot of info in that report but apparently its a coalition with Arab forces involved.

[Svejk]

There'll have to be boots on the ground now. Not sure who's boots.

[youngmafbog]

IT was inevitable. IS has to be stopped and they are in Syria.

Got to test out the new F22 Stealths anyway !

[jno]

so we're back on Assad's side after all that outrage against him? Just fancy that.

[youngmafbog]

No, we are not jno. The UK is not involved in Syria, only Iraq.

And out of interest I assume in your right-on mind no one should enter Syria to sort out IS as it is helping out Assad? What a peculiar point of view, do you back ISIS by any chance?

[jno]

sorting out IS is helping out Assad whether you like it or not. You think the man is a monster without peer... and then along comes someone worse.

[Khandro]

Cameron actually wanted to fight with them - the so-called 'rebels', - against Assad (the legally rightful leader of Syria) but the British electorate said no, and he backed down. At that time Paddy Ashdown astonishingly said it was one of the saddest decisions he'd ever had to witness, I wonder where he stands now.

[naomi24]

War against IS isn’t synonymous with support for Assad. Sometimes it's incumbent upon us to decide which is the lesser of the two evils. In this instance it's Hobson's choice.

[ToraToraTora]

spot on naomi, pity jno cannot comprehend that.

[anotheoldgit]

There is no need for any Western troops 'feet's on the Ground', especially British feet.

Let the Arab states sort this one out, they are not forced to fight with one hand tied behind their backs, we do enough sorting out, time we thought about our own for a change.

There is enough trouble over the voluntary aid hostages, imagine if these Islamic State savages captured scores of our troops and held them to ransom?

[Old_Geezer]

May be my imagination but there seems to be a lot of getting at folk in threads this morning, and it's not even mid-week.

I think this was (or should have been seen as) inevitable. One could not let them carry on as they were, the only decisions should have been how to get involved with minimal adverse reactions.

Situations change, what seemed a good idea at one point may seem less clear cut at another time, but for now IS is seen as the greater evil.

[Old_Geezer]

Refusing to take part and opting to ignore a situation is unlikely to help IMO. It just allows it to get worse there, and possibly 'the wrong bad guy' to triumph. Suppose we opted not to get involved in the fairly recent European wars, would we now be better off ? Would the world ?

[keyplus90]

////War against IS isn’t synonymous with support for Assad. Sometimes it's incumbent upon us to decide which is the lesser of the two evils. In this instance it's Hobson's choice.////

No, it's what suits us and when it suits us.

[naomi24]

Keyplus, what do you think the answer is to IS? Or would you rather the world left them to it?

[Peter Pedant]

// we do enough sorting out, time we thought about our own for a change. //

quite right AOG - after all we sorted out Scotland, didnt we ?

[Svejk]

I can sort of see where keyplus is coming from. The US is still talking about arming the good guys in Syria. Personally, I doubt there's any good guys involved. And I'm pretty sure some of the current coalition were IS backers. Western foreign policy 'seems' to a simple man like me to be all over the place.

[Svejk]

I expect a few of 'our' jihadis will be on their way home now.

[naomi24]

Svejk, I agree there are no good guys, which is why I said “Sometimes it's incumbent upon us to decide which is the lesser of the two evils”, but politics aside, did anyone really expect IS to do what it’s doing now? This has gone beyond politics, hasn’t it?

[Svejk]

I agree, they are dreadful and need sorting out. But we must make it conditional on a fairer deal for Sunni's if that's possible. Wiping them out and sailing off into the sunset isn't going to cure the problems. (which we're, at least, partly responsible for, imo.)