The list of West-supported turncoats gettng longer

Yup .... the list is long and getting longer but the politicians of the West will never see the support they give terrorists  as their folly and therein lie the downfall of us all.

Murtaza Haider, Toronto-based academic writing at Dawn:
It is a typical summer flick, but it holds a great lesson for the global power politics. Hercules, released earlier in the summer, shows how the son of Zeus fights against tyrants only to realise later that he has been tricked into fighting against the good guys.

President Barak Obama must also feel very Herculean. He and other Western leaders supported the Syrian rebels against President Bashar Al-Assad.

The same rebels either amalgamated with, or were overpowered by, al Qaeda militants resulting in the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a consortium of fanatic mercenaries whose control extend from Syria to the Sunni-majority parts of Iraq.

Compared to these extremists, who are massacring Shias in Iraq and beheading American journalists, Bashar Al-Assad may look like a saint.

The West and the wealthy Arab states jumped into bed with the Syrian rebels to counter the rising influence of Iran in the region. It took al Qaeda fewer than two years to take over the rebels in Syria and march towards Baghdad while it also threatened the Western countries.

From Osama Bin Laden to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (the self-proclaimed caliph and head of the ISIL), the long list of western supported turncoats suggests that the West has yet to learn from its past mistakes of sponsoring militants who turn against their interests.

It became obvious as early as in 2012 that the Western-backed, Arab-sponsored rebellion served as a rallying cry for al Qaeda militants to reconvene in Syria.

The West supported the Free Syrian Army to fight against the Bashar government. Slowly but surely, the al Qaeda proxies in Syria, primarily the al-Nusra Front, wrestled control from the Syrian rebels. Later, the Syrian al-Nusra Front entered into a formal alliance with al Qaeda and extended its reach from Syria into Iraq, and ultimately emerging as a global threat.

The Western interest in dismantling the Syrian regime was motivated by two factors.

First, the Syrian regime had proven to be a sustained source of discomfort for Israel. Syria supported anti-Israeli elements while Israel maintained its control over the Golan Heights, the territory it ceased from Syria in the six-day war and annexed it 1981. Syria has backed successive Palestinian regimes in their struggle. Even the Hamas leadership has been based out of Damascus.

Second, the recent push against Syria had more to do with the Arab regimes who felt threatened by the rising influence of Iran in the region............