Washington's Syria strategy helps splash the rest of the world with mud

Recent terror attacks in Belgium's capital Brussels killed more than 20 people at the Maelbeek metro station and at least 10 more at its international airport on Tuesday and wounded about 230 others. The European city was largely on lock down, its transportation system was interrupted and the airport was closed.

DAESH claimed responsibility for the deadly suicide bombings that came a day after Belgian Interior Minister Didier Reynders warned of possible revenge attacks following the arrest of the suspect of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, last week. Abdeslam is a Belgian-born French national.

Two brothers, Khalid and Brahim el-Bakraoui, who are Belgian citizens, have been identified as the Brussels suicide bombers in the latest deadly attacks in Brussels.

Najim Laachraoui, who is said to have been an accomplice of Abdeslam, was named as the third suspect and chief bomb maker for the Brussel attacks, was born in Morocco and grew up in Brussels. Laachraoui was arrested yesterday and had studied electromechanical engineering at a Catholic high school in Schaerbeek, one of the 19 municipalities in Brussels.

The EU has recently been terrified by the refugee crisis. Some EU leaders explicitly accuse the refugees of posing a terrorist threat in Europe and try to justify their ignorance regarding the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East for electoral gain while others seek ways to stop the refugee flow, making deals with Turkey to keep refugees out of Europe. However, the terror threat in Europe does not come from refugees. In fact, it comes from European citizens. The Paris attackers were European nationals, and so were the Brussels attackers. The nationality of the attackers reveal that the DAESH sickness is worse than thought, the diagnosis is wrong and the treatments are not appropriate.

The U.S.-led anti-DAESH coalition, which includes many countries, has chosen the wrong way to fight the terrorist group. In order to destroy DAESH, U.S. President Barack Obama's administration focused on DAESH omitting the rest of the problems in the Middle East and pushed U.S. allies to do the same. As many keep saying, DAESH is not the root of the problem and is just a symptom. It is a fact that the advance of DAESH in Syria and Iraq has been stopped after non-stop coalition airstrikes, but DAESH established new branches in Libya, Afghanistan and Yemen in order to show the world that they are still strong. In the meantime, they start to operate out of those failed states, carrying out suicide bombings. Turkey has been a DAESH target many times, with the latest attack this past weekend in Istanbul, and so has Europe. The San Bernardino shooters in the U.S. were DAESH supporters, according to DAESH. A Russian airliner crashed in 2015 after departing from Egypt for St. Petersburg, killing all 224 people on board. DAESH published a picture of a bomb in an issue of its online magazine Dabiq alleging that it was the bomb that brought down the plane.

It looks like DAESH terror is no closer to an end. The way Washington chose to deal with it is not draining the swamp in Syria and Iraq but helping to splash the rest of the world with mud. It is obvious that the world has never been as terrified as it is today. Fear is everywhere and the threat of another suicide bomber is everywhere. Other terrorist organizations such as the outlawed PKK are carrying out exactly the same kind of terror attacks that DAESH does, using the legitimacy the U.S. provided its Syrian affiliate Democratic Union Party (PYD) as a shield. Terror is spreading, and in return xenophobia is on the rise, triggering radicalization terror is becoming a more common result and terrorists are reaching their goal.

When I saw the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah's statement yesterday that said: "The fire that Europe in particular and the world in general is being burned by is the same one that some regimes ignited in Syria and other states in the region," I remembered the Syrian regime's highest cleric, Grand Mufti Ahmed Badereddine Hassoun, who in 2011 threatened to order suicide attacks in the U.S. and Europe if Syria was intervened in. "I am telling this to Europe and the U.S.: We will set up suicide attackers who now live on your land in case you bomb Syria or Lebanon," Hassoun said in a video that can still be found on YouTube.

Syria's Bashar Assad repeatedly threatened the world that he would "set fire" to the Middle East, which would spread soon, while deliberately releasing terror convicts and intentionally exacerbating terrorism shortly after the uprising began in March 2011. While Obama's Syria policy keeps failing and is helping the world to become more insecure, Assad, who threatened the world with terror and did not hesitate to do so, is still in power.