Syrian National Coalition President Hadi Bahra says the Syrian Free Army rebels are fighting a two-front war in the country's three-way civil war, but the other two sides are not fighting each other.
Appearing Monday on
"The Daily Show," Bahra said that since the beginning of 2014 the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad and the terror group Islamic State (ISIS) have not exchanged fire.
"Assad never fought ISIS. ISIS never fought Assad since the start of the year and the start of the presence of ISIS inside Syria," Bahra said.
ISIS has fought only the Free Syrian Army, he said, while Assad carried out airstrikes against the rebels while leaving ISIS alone.
"Go google it," he said. "You'll find nothing. All the strikes are against civilians, against people inside Aleppo using TNT bombs and using extreme violence against his own people."
Though the fundamentalist Sunni ISIS would appear to be a natural enemy to Assad's more moderate, if dictatorial, regime, Bahra said Assad planned from the beginning to eliminate the moderate rebels, thus painting a picture for the world of "an evil terrorist organization and an evil dictatorship."
Assad assumed the world would choose the lesser of the two evils, thus cooperating with his government, Bahra said.
"Luckily, the free world refused to do this, and they understood the game, and they stood by the Syrian people," he said.
But his moderates cannot continue fighting on two fronts without assistance of the United States and rest of the free world, Bahra added.
U.S. airstrikes, with help from five Arabic countries, began a week ago to take out ISIS targets in Syria.
"I think the world has started to move in the right direction," he said. "They need to notice that they cannot eliminate terrorism by only military operations. … You have to have a social, political program. You need to provide a vision of political life for all the region in the Middle East."
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