WASHINGTON, D.C. – During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing this morning with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter on the U.S. strategy to defeat ISIS, U.S. Senator Angus King (I-Maine) condemned calls to marginalize Muslims as a strategic mistake that would play into the hands of ISIS. In an exchange with Defense Secretary Carter, Senator King pointed out that it is a deliberate strategy of ISIS to create a division between the U.S. and Islam and such calls would undermine national security by pushing Muslims towards radicalization.

“It strikes me that this is an exceedingly complex challenge, but part of the problem is we want to defeat ISIS but we want to do it in such a way that doesn’t propagate their ideology around the Muslim world and that really makes it very difficult,” Senator King said. “The question is: how do we keep moderate Muslims, the vast majority of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, from falling into the ISIS trap? ISIS has made it clear that part of their strategy is to provoke us, to westernize this conflict, and to make it a war of America and the West against Islam and thereby pushing heretofore moderate Muslims in their direction.”

Senator King, who is a member of Senate Intelligence Committee, also told the Defense Secretary that he believed introducing large-scale American ground forces into Syria to fight ISIS could also play into their strategy because it would be seen as the West attacking Islam. Instead, Senator King said, moderate Muslim forces need to fight the ground war in Syria. The gap in the Obama Administration’s current strategy, Senator King continued, is that those forces are not currently available in Syria because they are fighting a civil war to topple Bashaar al-Assad, Syria’s brutal dictator. Senator King pressed Defense Secretary Carter to have the Administration work with partners and allies to hasten the removal of Assad, who, through his brutality, has only driven more people to ISIS’s ranks.

“The gap in the strategy, it seems to me, from the beginning is: where do we get ground troops in Syria. Arab ground troops – Muslim ground troops – are available in Iraq: the Iraqi Security Forces and the Peshmerga [the Kurdish Army]. In Syria, there’s not an available force, and that’s why it seems to me that the whole issue of getting rid of Assad is a key part of this calculation,” Senator King said. “Assad is the lightening rod that in effect created ISIS, or in part, and if we can work with other parties, particularly Russia, to move Assad off the stage, then you’ve got an Arab army, a Muslim army, in Syria – it’s all of the opposition, except perhaps El Nusra, and the Syrian Army. That’s why it seems to me that’s a key part of it. Somehow we’ve got to accelerate the timetable. We can’t wait years for Assad to leave and then turn the guns of the opposition and the Syrian Army on ISIS.”

Senator King has long believed that Assad must be removed from power. Following a trip to the Middle East in July 2013 during which he visited several Syrian refugee camps, Senator King penned a Washington Post op-ed with Senator Carl Levin, then-Chairmen of the Senate Armed Services Committee, calling for the United States to work with regional allies and partners to remove Assad from power and put an end to the bloodshed. Earlier this year, he called on the Obama Administration to recalibrate its strategy in countering ISIS to ensure that Assad is removed.

Senator King today also said that the United States must do a better job at countering ISIS’s vast propaganda network.

This country has to do a much better job at countering the story that ISIS is telling to attract young people across the world,” said Senator King. “We’re not only engaged in a military war here, we’re engaged in a war of ideas and right now I think it’s somewhere close to a stalemate on the military side but we’re losing the war of ideas.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee, of which Senator King is a member, today held a hearing on the U.S. strategy to counter ISIS and U.S. policy toward Iraq and Syria. U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Paul Selva, USAF were the witnesses.

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