No partner in Assad

So many places in the Middle East are on fire at the moment. Israel is bombarding Gaza, Hamas is firing rockets at Israel, and in the shadow of those events the radical Islamist group ISIS and their self-proclaimed "caliph" Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have been taking over more and more towns and regions in Iraq and Syria.

The jihadists now control an area of both countries that is several times larger than Lebanon. They have been terrorizing the population there and punishing anyone who opposes them with a firing squad or crucifixion. If no one stops them, they will probably keep expanding their brutal dictatorship.

But who can help? Iraq's regular army has already proved amply that it lacks both the necessary means and the morale to stop ISIS. It gave up the city of Mosul, for instance, without a fight. The Kurdish Peshmerga militia are better organized, but their only apparent goal is to guard Kurdish and neighboring regions, so as to mark out the terrain for a potential Kurdish state should Iraq and Syria's structures collapse completely. The Shiite militias in Iraq are also serving their own particular interests.

Who stops ISIS?

So who is left? No one has yet said it out loud, except for a few western Middle East experts. But the question remains whether the altered circumstances could also make alliances necessary - perhaps even collaboration between western countries and Assad's internationally isolated regime in Syria. Following a pseudo-election, the dictator is on the point of entering his new term as president in the areas he exclusively controls. For some time now he has been presenting himself as a bulwark against radical Sunni Islamists.

The Americans have shown, with the example of Egypt, that they are not above adapting their relations to key nations in the region if realpolitik calls for it. Suddenly , Washington no longer sees Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi as primarily an ex-military man who is reversing democratic reforms in his own country while suppressing human rights and press freedom. The US now sees him as a mediator between Israel and the radical Islamist Hamas - even if initial Egypt's initial attempts have failed.

Political interests

What is clear is that Washington needs partners in the Middle East. Everything else is secondary to this pragmatic need. And yet it is equally clear that the West can't choose its partners at will - alliances with regimes like Egypt, or oil-rich, human-rights-abusing Saudi Arabia are cynical enough, but neither Saudi Arabia nor Egypt have a long-running war with more than 170,000 deaths on their conscience. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Egypt have been flattening entire cities, together with their populations, in their own territory. So it's much to the new British Foreign Minister Philip Hammond's credit when he makes clear that Assad can't be a partner to the West - even in times of ISIS domination. You can't combat terrorism effectively by cooperating with regimes that are themselves terrorizing a large swath of their own people.