Several British newspapers have focused on the need to combat the Islamic State arguing that this requires a calculated intervention and a broad alliance between the West, Islamic countries and Russia.
The Daily Telegraph’s Defence Editor Con Coughlin said Daesh is a well-organised and resourced organisation and only a strategy that fully acknowledges the scale of the threat will have any chance of success.
“The greater task, though, will be to devise a viable plan for destroying Daesh in Syria, as well as in Iraq,” he said using another acronym to describe the group.
“The immediate challenge is to get enough votes to overturn the Commons ban against military intervention in Syria, which itself is no easy matter and is now unlikely to take place until after the party conferences, thereby allowing MPs a full and thorough discussion of the issues involved.”
Meanwhile, David Gardner wrote in the Financial Times that the west should help the Sunni majority against both the Assad regime and the Islamic State.
“Amid all the finger-pointing and floundering about the refugee emergency… there has been little examination of Syria policy and what its manifest shortcomings have contributed to the present crisis,” Gardner said.
According to the writer a more coherent policy needs to find ways of helping the Sunni majority in Syria on the ground and against their tormentors: Bashar Al-Assad’s minority regime and the Sunni jihadists of Daesh.
“The moral imperative needs no explanation but the strategic aim is to turn Sunni opinion against Daesh,” he explained, using another acronym for the group.
The author said that Assad has used sectarian war to create the self-fulfilling conditions whereby he would be seen as the only alternative to jihadism. He is the flipside of the caliphate on which his forces have barely laid a glove. Validating this cynicism, which has led to 300,000 dead and at least six million registered and unofficial refugees, will only worsen the crisis.
The Independent newspaper said that a broad alliance between the West, Islamic countries and Russian President Vladimir Putin is the only way to defeat the organisation, repair relations at the international level, neutralise the Islamic State cancer and help the desperate people in Syria and abroad.