New US president should work with Russia to fight ISIS

Thousands of Kurdish and Iraqi army soldiers, assisted by around 5,000 American advisers and airpower, have been battling in recent days with fighters of the Islamic State (ISIS) outside the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

The long-awaited offensive is aimed at liberating a major strategic part of Iraq from the control of the jihadi militants who have been waging a worldwide war of terror from its bases in the Middle East. Military experts are predicting that as the battle inches closer to Mosul, the Iraqi ground troops, as well as the Kurdish soldiers, will suffer a large number of casualties. US President Barack Obama expects "a difficult fight" to capture the city that could take several weeks, or even months. If the ongoing offensive ends with a military victory, there is still a lot of concern that it would be followed by a humanitarian crisis for the hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in the city. It goes without saying that a military victory would have to lead to a political agreement between the Arab-Shiite-led government and the leaders of the Arab-Sunni and the Kurdish communities who fear that the ruling Shiites and their Iranian allies would try to marginalise their power in the country.

Indeed, one of the reasons that the ISIS has been enjoying support among Arab-Sunnis in Iraq as well as in Syria has been the perception that Iran, the most powerful Shiite nation in the region, has been the driving force behind what they see as the anti-Sunni strategy pursued by the regimes in Baghdad and Damascus. And, in fact, capturing Mosul and defeating the ISIS in Iraq would have to be followed by a similar effort to crush the group and the forces that are allied with it that now control large territory of Syria.