WASHINGTON – In a hearing of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) questioned U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry on the United States’ strategy to defeat ISIS. During the exchange, Murphy expressed his concerns about arming and training the Syrian rebels and their potential coordination with Al Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda.

It strikes me that we’re dealing with a fundamentally new problem in a frustratingly familiar context. The new problem is ISIL. They are on the verge of becoming the world’s first autonomous terrorist state. If they are successful, I have no doubt that they will turn their focus on the United States and our allies. But the familiar new problem is the Middle East and if we’ve learned anything over the last 12 years of war, it’s that the Middle East seems largely immune from U.S. efforts to bend it to our will. That’s not an excuse to sit idly by, it’s just a reason why we have to be very careful about crafting a strategy that’s not just well intentioned but realistic.

 

I think that you and the president have got it largely right. I’m broadly supportive of the strategy that you’ve laid out with one exception, and so I want to just bring us back to the question about arming and training Syrian rebels. When we talked about this in open session a year ago, we raised concerns about the potential for the Free Syrian Army to coordinate with Al Nusra, the wing of Al Qaeda. There was confidence that that would not end up being the case, but we have a variety of reports that, indeed, it has been the practice - most recently in a joint effort between the Free Syrian Army and Al Nusra Front to take a border post between Syria and Israel. So let me ask you that question: why are you confident and how can you give us confidence that we are not going to train a fighting force that is then going to enter a battle with a known affiliate of Al Qaeda? And how confident are we that ultimately, when they got on the field of battle, that they aren’t going to look to ISIS, who is fighting the same enemy that they originally entered into battle against, Assad, in common cause?

I understand that there are going to be strange bedfellows, but to the extent that the strange bedfellows are the Free Syrian Army fighting alongside Al Nusra, which is a wing and affiliate of Al Qaeda, I hope that is not a reality that we’re prepared to accept.

Last week, Murphy delivered a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate during which he outlined four principles that he believes should serve as the foundation for action against ISIS.