WASHINGTON (AP) Aug. 30, 2016 – In his speech at the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump made six references to the conflict in Syria, pointing to the war-ravaged nation as a source of much of the world’s turmoil, particularly immigration and extremism.
A week later at the Democratic convention, Hillary Clinton made not one reference to Syria.
The conflict in Syria remains a major conundrum for both President Barack Obama and Clinton, his former secretary of state.
With a firm reluctance to enter another U.S. war in the Middle East, the United States has focused its military efforts on fighting the Islamic State group in northern Syria and in Iraq while pursuing so-far failed diplomatic efforts to end the civil war.
Now entering its sixth year, the Syria conflict has killed more than a quarter million people, displaced some 11 million, and has turned the once-cosmopolitan, secular country into a hive of factions with dangerously competing interests.
“Of the two or three biggest legacy problems for the Obama administration, in terms of foreign policy, Syria will figure prominently on that list,” said Robert Ford, U.S. ambassador to Syria during the uprising and now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. There is an element within the Democratic Party, Ford adds, that “would go as far as to say the United States helped to cause that problem.”
