Interview: Syria crisis may drag on due to IS threat: British expert

The prolonged Syria crisis will become more complicated and is likely to continue for another few years in face of the increasing threat from the Islamic State (IS), a British expert says.

There were two main reasons for the quick rise of the IS after the breakout of the crisis in 2011, Neil Quilliam, acting head of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Britain, told Xinhua in a recent interview.

"One is the vacuum that the crisis created. The vacuum arose when there was a transformation from protest in the streets to armed conflict ... As a consequence of that there was a vacuum," he said.

He added that the IS is actually not new, but rather emerged from the ashes of a group commonly known as al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI).

"AQI had been weakened by events in Iraq but they managed to move that infrastructure and their command and control center into that vacuum (in Syria). They shifted, not wholesale, but they were able to move into that space. It is a combination of those two factors," Quilliam said.

In the view of the expert, the expansion of the IS, also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant ( ISIL) or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), has made the Syria crisis more complicated.

"ISIS added an international dimension to what would otherwise have been an Iraqi domestic crisis," he said. "By the fact you had ISIS operating in that Syrian theater it drew in international fighters and broadened AQI's agenda. That has driven part of the Syria conflict."

Quilliam said that due to the rise of the IS, the confrontation between the group and the Syrian regime seemed to become the main domestic conflict in the country, which will have an impact on the future of the crisis.

Meanwhile, he said, the threat from the IS is likely to prompt Western countries to reach "some form of accommodation" with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

On the prospects of the Syria crisis, Quilliam said it may drag on for years if the international community fails to find a final political solution as soon as possible.

"There are no significant diplomatic efforts on the table at the present. There is the Moscow Talks, and the Cairo Talks but they do not seem to be bearing very much fruit at the moment, so I would very much see the crisis rumbling on for another five or six years," he said.

"There just is not the international will at the moment to push ahead with a diplomatic solution. But the key thing for the diplomatic community will be containing ISIS within Syria," he noted. Endi