Few if any intelligence officials saw a takeover of Baghdad by the Islamic State (ISIS) as a possibility — until now, says a former CIA analyst.
With ISIS fighters said to be encircling the Iraqi capital, and closing in on the city's airport, "I don't see any indication that Baghdad is safe," Lisa Ruth, intelligence analyst with the private firm LIGNET, told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on
Newsmax TV Monday.
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Ruth said that the extremist army's
march toward Baghdad and its continued siege of a Syrian town,
Kobani, near Turkey's border, both demonstrate what policymakers have known all along — that U.S. airstrikes alone are not going to vanquish an extremely capable, adaptable and well-armed enemy force.
Likewise, reports that ISIS fighters may have fired chemical weapons — looted from old stockpiles of Iraqi mustard gas — show that the radical Islamist fighters "will use anything at their disposal" and must also be assumed to be trying to procure nuclear weapons, said Ruth.
Meanwhile, an untrustworthy Turkish government is playing all sides in the struggle against ISIS, but even so, the United States must find a way to persuade the country's leaders to close off ISIS supply routes that run from Turkey into Syria, said Ruth.
"You can't stop ISIS without Turkey," she said.
Elsewhere, a report that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to station tactical nuclear weapons in Crimea — a region of neighboring Ukraine that Putin annexed by force — lays bare the passivity of NATO and the West in the face of Russia's territorial aggression.
"The world has effectively ceded Crimea," said Ruth.
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