President Barack Obama has made such a mess in the Middle East that radical Muslims who were once at each other’s throats are now forced to unite in order to fight off ISIS.
Only a few years ago, the Taliban and the Iranian regime were mortal enemies. They are both run by radical Muslims, but the difference between them is that the Taliban is Sunni whereas Iran is Shiite. This made them natural enemies struggling with each other for regional hegemony. Tehran even went so far as to support the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan: the group that was fighting against the Taliban back in 2001.
In other words, the two have never been friends. And that’s a significant understatement.
All that has changed with the rise of ISIS, however:
Tehran is going even further, and enlisting elements of the Taliban to slow the Islamic State’s expansion inside Afghanistan and prevent militants from the group — which espouses a violently anti-Shiite ideology — from crossing into Iran.
“The Iranians are already trying to secure their immediate borders towards Afghanistan against ISIS penetration by working together with various groups — warlords [and] Taliban — along their own borders to create a buffer zone,” the European Union’s special representative to Afghanistan, Ambassador Franz-Michael Mellbin, said in a recent interview. “They are already working on this.”
The reason that Iran and the Taliban are joining forces is the rise of ISIS in Afghanistan. According to U.S. officials there are now, at a bare minimum, 3,000 ISIS jihadists active in that country.
Yeah, that’s the same country President Obama wanted to abandon because the war was supposedly won: over and done with. Afghanistan could take care of itself! Peace in our time!
Well, not so much. The reduced military presence of the U.S. in Afghanistan actually created a power vacuum, which isn’t only filled up by the Taliban, but also — and more importantly right now — by ISIS. As a result, Iran and the Taliban are now ganging up… and they’re actually helped out by the White House:
President Barack Obama, who had once promised to end America’s longest war before leaving office, has instead given the Pentagon the green light to ramp up its air campaign against the Islamic State fighters inside Afghanistan. Between the beginning of January and the end of March, U.S. warplanes carried out roughly 100 strikes in Afghanistan, the vast bulk in the eastern province of Nangarhar, an Islamic State stronghold.
So first the U.S. weakened its presence in Afghanistan thereby giving ISIS the opportunity to infiltrate the country. Then Iran and the Taliban — two sworn enemies of America — joined forces in an attempt to hold on to their territory and possibly expand it, and then the U.S. feels forced to help them out because ISIS might be worse than they are, which says a lot, because the Iranian regime is downright genocidal.
This what Obama’s ridiculous, lunatic foreign policy has brought us.
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