Turkey’s supposed battle against ISIS too, with Operation Euphrates Shield, was advertised as Erdogan creating a buffer zone between his Turkey and extremists. Meanwhile Assad continues to massacre, gass, bomb and torture his people. Russia’s intervention too in Syria, which was overtly to tackle ISIS, cemented Assad’s fragmented reign over much of Syria and served to create a foothold for Russian influence in the region. They used the fight against ISIS as a means of legitimizing their separatists ambitions, which is the opposite of what “coming together” looks like. The same is true of their massive land grab in eastern Syria in the Deir Ezzour Governorate, where the SDF, supported by the U.S., is in an all-out race to take Syria’s oil fields away from ISIS and thus away from Assad. When the Syrian Kurdish led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) besieged Raqqa, they did so to gain the city as a bargaining chip-to get more power in ISIS’ wake to use in future negotiations regarding their autonomy with the Assad regime. While disparate groups did fight ISIS, they did so separately, and with their own interests in mind. The author implicitly adopts the classic phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” but the Middle East is more complicated than that, and there can be three or four sides to a conflict, not just two. Although they didn’t always coordinate directly, almost every significant entity in Syria and Iraq supported the anti-ISIS campaign.” The problem with this is that their ‘differences’ or their divergent political aims, were never ‘set aside’ but re-energized and inflamed thanks to ISIS’ gains and losses, which became open land waiting to be seized by whomever could lay claim to it. The author insists that, when ISIS commenced its blitzkrieg of Northern Iraq and Syria in 2014, all sides recognized this threat and acted accordingly: “riefly united by common cause against ISIS, odd bedfellows temporarily set aside their differences. The war against ISIS did more to tear the Middle East apart from inside and out-allowing Iran, Russia, and Turkey to stake their claims in Syria and Iraq, and giving Kurdish separatist movements the opportunity to use the political vacuum ISIS created to acquire geopolitical bargaining chips to be used to move away from Damascus and Baghdad. This idea demonstrates an all-too common but morbid failure of imagination that quietly relies on a thread of logic that Middle Eastern nations can only come together if there is a war to be fought. The gravest error the article commits is thinking that ISIS’ presence was at all stabilizing enough to be used as a model of Middle Eastern solidarity for the future. In this claim, the author of the piece is short on facts, heavy on oversimplified nostalgia for when ISIS was a military threat, and reliant on a deep misunderstanding of why different groups battled against ISIS in the first place. The article then decries that this time spent fighting ISIS could have been used to form deeper alliances between the Syrian regime and the opposition and Kurds in Syria, and between Baghdad and the Kurds in Iraq. The article claimed that the war against ISIS allowed otherwise warring factions to see past their differences and work together toward defeating a common enemy, and this pressing ‘pause’ on the conflict temporarily brought the Middle East together. 17, The Atlantic published a piece titled “The War on ISIS Held the Middle East Together” by Thanassis Cambanis, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and columnist at The Boston Globe. Each Side used ISIS to Further its own Agenda