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Source: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/dec/27/how-al-qaeda-changed-syrian-war/
How Al-Qaeda Changed the Syrian War
(New York Review of Books) Sarah Birke - Since its appearance last April, the rebel organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) has changed the course of the Syrian war. By gaining power, it has forced the U.S. government and its European allies to rethink their strategy of intermittent support to the moderate opposition and rhetoric calling for the ouster of Syrian President Assad. After months of shunning Islamist groups in Syria, the Obama administration has now said it may need to talk to the Islamist Front, a new coalition of hard-line rebel groups, in part because they might prove a buffer against the more extreme ISIS.