UK analysts say anti-ISIL action to worsen Syria crisis

In the wake of the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, concerns are rising that certain Western countries may be already preparing to take a military action against ISIL terrorists in Syria.

While the exact efficiency of any military move against the terrorists may not be known, concerns are rising among analysts that this could eventually prove counterproductive.  

Nahella Ashraf, an activist based in Manchester, has told Press TV that bombing ISIL in Syria will do nothing to stop terrorism as the experience of wars that were waged in the region since 2001 clearly shows.    

“If you do nothing [in Syria] but create more refugees around the world, you are only going to make the people of the Middle East more angry with the West and instead make the ISIL more acceptable,” said Ashraf.   

Other analysts believe that taking any military action on Syria is a wrong political move and will lead to a confrontation with Russia.

“What we are going to have is not going to be necessarily a military action per se but a military action obviously with overtones and undertones,” Clive Hambidge, the director of human development at Facilitate Global told Press TV.

“Now that Russia has become involved …if we look at it in terms of a war, it is not going to be a war that Russia would want to lose,” he added.

Hambidge added that any decision by Britain to get involved in the Syrian war would be as wrong as the historic mistake that was taken to take the country to the war in Iraq back in 2003.

Such a decision, he warned, could threaten Britain’s national interests from the political point of view.      

“We would go ahead in partnership with America in creating a greater a greater problem in Syria and that’s a humanitarian catastrophe that is taking place we have millions of refugees internally and externally,” said Hambidge.   

“We have a catastrophe that is unfolding,” he warned. “I think a majority of people who are right minded would see that going into Syria and creating more disturbance is only going to provoke confrontation with Russia”.   

Ian Williams, a senior analyst with the Foreign Policy in Focus, believes that taking a military action against the ISIL in Syria is not as easy as it sounds.

“It is very complicated.  This is a three or four sided war in Syria. When you take action, who you are taking action against? This is because any action taken against one party implies that you are taking action against the other,” he told Press TV’s UK Desk in an exclusive interview. 

“So NATO is hardly going to come right in to the rescue of President Assad and the remnants of the Ba’ath regime in Damascus. On the other hand, the Turks are not going to let them come to the rescue of the Syrian Kurds.”       

And simply to go against ISIL without supporting the Free Syrian Army is going to meet objections from the powers that support Assad such as Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, he added.

Williams said there is still a lack of a coherent plan on what really needs to be done toward the terrorists in Syria.

He added that many are nonetheless worried that the Western states may proceed with a bombing campaign on Syria without a clear objective.

“Bombings initially may look great for public relations because it shows that you are doing something,” he said. “But the civilian collateral damage is so high that you will lose public support the very first time you manage to hit a yet another hospital or a yet another housing block the support for this diminishes.”  

Sabby Dhalu, a UK-based anti-racism activist, has told Press TV that some key details that have come out of the Paris terror attacks are murky.   

“Does anybody know for sure if the perpetrators of these attacks were actually people who were refugees because of some passports that have been found?” said Dhalu.

“We don’t know if that passport belongs to one of the perpetrators. We simply don’t know. That passport could have belonged to a victim who died as a result of the attack,” she added.

Dhalu emphasized that some details on the attacks that have come out to the media appear to have been purposefully engineered to tarnish the image of the refugees who have escaped the war in Syria and fled to Europe. 

“The truth is that even if one of the perpetrators happens to be a refugee, just because one person is connected to an act of terrorism, the idea that the global population of refugees are terrorists is conveniently ludicrous and factually incorrect,” she added.       

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