 Well, thank you very much, and welcome to our panel today. I'm going to jump right into it, so we have as much time as we can for our speakers. Their bios are in your program, so I will skip over their bios, but from going across the stage from closest to me, Ambassador Farid Yaseem, the ambassador of Iraq to the United States, and Nadia Dave Nier. I've asked each of our panelists to start by giving an initial opening statement that answers the question that is the title of this panel. After ISIS, what is next in the Middle East? So I've asked each of our panelists to take about five minutes to initially answer that question before we move into discussion. Ambassador. Thank you, Doug. Well, I thank the organizers for inviting me and for choosing this very timely topic. Perhaps the best way to start this is to emphasize what the future of the Middle East is not going to be. And I'm going to focus on Iraq, and it's not going to be ISIS. And that is a very, very loaded statement. And I'll give you two examples that illustrate the difference between what we want, what is going to happen, what is happening, in fact, and what could have happened had we not defeated ISIS. Last December, Christians in Mosul celebrated Christmas, not a bad achievement. When just three, four years ago, they had been completely expelled from the city, a thing that hadn't happened in over 1,000 years. And then come May, the 12th of May, we are going to have elections in Iraq, national elections. These are things that we've held to. We've held elections as constitutionally mandated over the last 14 years, which is not a small achievement, I think. And so these two examples illustrate the kind of Iraq that we're actually working to try to accomplish to achieve, which is a multi-sectarian, multi-ethnic democracy. Of course, that's not the whole end of the story, because we're coming out of 30 years of dictatorship and then 10 years of occupation and wars and mismanagement and corruption. And so Iraq, ideally, over the next few months and perhaps years will become a huge shantytown. We're going to start to rebuild the infrastructure that was destroyed by ISIS. But not only that, I think what we need to also rebuild is our institutions that have suffered quite a deal over the last 30, 40 years in order for us to be able to provide the services that our population is expecting and regain their trust. And this is, in fact, the only way for us to ensure that people like ISIS will not find the kind of traction that ISIS founded in 2014. Great. Nadia? Thank you all for coming. And I express my gratitude to New America and ASU for bringing us all together. I agree with the ambassador that ISIS is not the future. So we pay a lot of lip service to the fact that the war is a war of ideas, essentially, that we cannot actually kill our way to victory when it comes to terrorism. So in the past few decades, Saudi Arabia spent billions of dollars to spread Wahhabism. And practically everywhere, there was this ISIS-like doctrine. We have terrorism. So if we spend billions teaching fascism, would we be surprised if there's a lot of fascism in the world? So if we believe that this is a war of ideas, at least in part, because, of course, we need protective use of force. So if we agree that the war of ideas is essential, so how do we win this war of ideas? So let's look at history. When people talk about the Middle East, they remind audiences, especially those of us who have a heart connection to the Middle East or born and raised in the Middle East, people often reference two times in history where the Middle East was the example by which the world looked up to. One of these phases was the Middle Ages, and the other is 19th century Egypt. Let's look at the Middle Ages. People say, oh, well, this is the place where there was philosophy and diversity and Sufism. And how did this come about, this peak in civilization? And I argue it came about by translating and allowing heretics to speak. Heretics are the answer, because if you look at all these books, if you look, they were not by people who said, oh, we need to apply Sharia. These were people who actually challenged the norm, who people philosophers like Aviros, Ibn Sina, Arrazi, they all have in common is that they had the title heretic. They argued things that were unacceptable, which is why their books were burnt, which is why we only have a few of their books. Argued things like, religion is based on symbols, symbols divide people, but philosophy is the pursuit of truth. And we can all argue in this value to pursue the truth and value the truth for its own. These authors challenged the norm. There was a space, of course, and that space came from political power. There was visionary, temporary political power that allowed this space to exist. If we look at the peak of the 19th century, which, again, these civilizational peaks stand the test of time. They are still phenomenal today, as they were in their time. The amount of culture that was produced in Egypt in the first half of the 20th century is still now among the most beautiful spots in history when it comes to Egypt. The movies, go see the movies done in Egypt in the 40s. The music, like Om Kalthum, Asma Khan, today they are still popular. Today they are still the most beautiful. How did this cultural civilization come about? Well, it was heretical ideas, again. It started with this, again, endorsement of power. So this is not to dismiss, this is not, sadly, a grassroots movement. Power allowed it. Muhammad Ali sent clerics, in fact, and all sorts of people to bring military knowledge to Egypt. They mastered French, a lot of these scholars, so that they can translate military manuals because Europe has become a military power, and they were basically destroying the Ottoman Empire, taking countries from under Ottoman rule, and the military power they could not, basically they couldn't kill their way through it, too. So they sent people to Paris, and people like Tahtawi didn't just translate military manuals, he translated Voltaire, he translated Rousseau. He went back to Egypt and introduced heretical ideas like, we should teach boys and girls alongside one another. These ideas became so rampant for a very short period. So what we need today is that heretical voice that is a humanist that has enlightenment values. I highly recommend a book I'm reading right now called Enlightenment Now, that talks about these values, and how relevant they are still today in winning things like terrorism, which is hitting every capital in Europe. These heretics exist. What is so alarming is that companies like Facebook and YouTube are shutting down the Facebook pages of our Voltaires and our Spinozas and our Rousseau. Why? Because they are deemed defensive to the most conservative voice, which is in power. So if we really are serious about giving the Middle East, and actually all of humanity, I'm sure there's a lot of Americans in this room, we all pay billions of dollars every year to countering terrorism. So it's not a Muslim issue, it's a global issue. So let's support the heretics of the Middle East, and they do exist, thank you. Thank you, Dave. So I'm gonna try and answer the question in a fairly weird way, I guess. I think of the region as being like a Rubik's Cube, right? It's very complex, but it's not random. It has a mosaic of tiles, each of which you can consider as a conflict, some hot, some cold. Those tiles are linked to each other when you move one set, another set move, and those linkages are not always obvious, but there are some patterns, and the different actors in each of these conflicts can move in multiple ways, and when one set of actors moves, it changes the other. Now I should admit I've never been patient enough to actually do a Rubik's Cube. I'm not sure that our current political leadership in this country or many of the other countries in the region are either, but if we think about each of the tiles, it's, and ISIS is just one of them. There's the Russia-Turkey alignment, which is currently happening in northern Syria. There's the Syrian civil war itself. There's the ongoing conflict in Yemen. There's the, let's say the mopping up of the remnant of Iraq, of ISIS in Iraq. There's the conflict that many people are talking about that hasn't quite yet happened in Lebanon. There's the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and then if you go slightly more broadly, there's some really significant activity going on in Libya, in the Sahel, in Francophone, West Africa, in Egypt, and in Somalia. So there's any number of different conflicts, but as I said, it's not random. There are a number of linkages that are relatively easy to identify. One of them is the rise of independent Kurdistan, which really became a problem for the region structurally only last year, but obviously has been around for a century. I can remember two years ago at this conference making the comment that we currently like the Kurds primarily because they're the only population group in Iraq that's not actively trying to kill us. But that's not how other people in the region have typically seen it, and what happened last September with the referendum really changed a lot of people's calculus. The eclipse of ISIS, and I don't think it's permanent, I think it is temporary, and I'll talk about that in a minute, is another set of linkages that drives a lot of what's happening. The entry of Turkey as a combatant into Iraq and Syria, carving out territorial buffer zone is a new factor that's also driving a lot of the realignment in those conflict tiles. Frankly, the uncertainty of a lot of actors about US policy and the coherence of US policy and who speaks for US policy has been one of the drivers of a lot of things we've seen. And then I'm not quite comfortable with this terminology, but I think we're seeing the emergence of what you might call an Astana axis, Ankara, Tehran, and Moscow, and that is new in terms of the conflict that we're seeing. So as we talk about the Middle East after ISIS, it's worth remembering like what is ISIS? It's multiple things. And the element that has been eclipsed is one of the three primary components of Daesh, and it's the caliphate, the territorial state that existed in Iraq and Syria. And at one point had the population of Singapore and about a third of each country under its technical control, maybe 22 cities at one point. So something that thought it was a nation state that fought like a nation state that tried to govern itself like a nation state and had clearly forgotten the lesson of 1991, which is if you fight the Americans and their allies like you're a nation state, you're gonna get your ass kicked. And now that that territorial entity no longer exists, the other two entities that have always been part of the network, the Wiliat structure in another 20 countries, the regional affiliates, and then this kind of ad hoc set of ISIS networks that I call the international is still in existence, probably 80% of the structure that existed before the fall of Raqqa is still in existence. It's simply organized in a different fashion. And so as I look forward, I think what we're going to see is those drivers, those linkages in the region are going to reshape the region geopolitically. Of those, I think the entry of Turkey and the rise of Kurdistan are the two most important in a military sense, but by far the most important geopolitical linkage that's realigning is the emergence of Turkey, Russia, and Iran as de facto allies. And you see this playing out right now this afternoon in the UN Security Council. So I think we're going to look back on this period as a lull. We are going to see ISIS come back. It's simply dropped back to the guerrilla mode from the state-like mode. And now it has many options to rebuild and recover and it would not be the first time, it wouldn't even be the third or fourth time that this particular crowd of guys have done that. And I'm going to end, because I know Nia has many smarter things to say. I'll scruffy into the panel here. Which is there's the one group that I don't hear people talking about that aren't in the business that more people should be thinking about is Hayat-Tahrir al-Sham, which is by far the most capable, politically smart, socially engaged, military-capable Terrascript that I've ever encountered. And I think it's the next cab off the rank. Even if ISIS takes a while to come back, we're going to be dealing with HTS in some way in the region, in the immediate future. So tell me where I'm wrong, man. Nia. Well, I like the Rubik's Cube analogy. I've used maybe a similar one that the region is like an ecosystem. And I've written that that ecosystem was hit by an asteroid in 2003, which was the American invasion, which much like the one that killed the dinosaurs, changed the entire evolution of the region, created new identities and destroyed old ones, and we're still feeling that. And I think every day in my work in the Middle East I encounter the ramifications that we can tie the election of Trump, the refugee crisis, in Europe, the rise of the right, obviously ISIS, so many things that happen not just in the Middle East, but even in the West, are consequences of that invasion. I'm in the future of war conference, but I think the future doesn't have to be war. It can be more peaceful. Part of the problem in the Middle East is that Washington is addicted to war in the Middle East. I'm not gonna look at the entire Middle East, just the few places I work. I'll start with Iraq. For the first time now in Iraq, there's no force internal or external that's trying to overthrow the government for the first time since 2003. Sunni communities that used to protect or shelter insurgents no longer do that now, instead they cooperate with security forces. From Fallujah to Mosul to elsewhere, we see the very same communities that used to shelter insurgents or al-Qaeda or ISIS now wanting to kill not just those insurgents, but even their families, taking it to the other extreme. In my view, the Sunni-Shia war in Iraq is over. There's no longer any support for a Sunni radical Islamist movement. And otherwise very depressing Middle East, Iraq is the only place where I find hope in. If you can disregard the last 15 years of horror, Iraq is the only democracy in the Middle East. All actors from former Sunni hardliners to the most ideologically hardline Shia paramilitary forces accept the new political order, accept elections and democracy, and believe it, that's a legitimate way of attaining power and are no longer trying to overthrow the government in any other way. There's a belief that consensus and power sharing are essential elements of the process. Again, from former Sunni hardliners to Shia hardliners, everybody in Iraq tends to believe that. Unlike in the past now with the election season in Iraq, we don't see sectarian incitement or incitement to violence. We see increasing cross-sectarian and cross-ethnic cooperation. The good news is everybody in Iraq is divided. I was at the US Embassy in Baghdad like six months ago and somebody asked me, how can you reunite the Sunnis? I said, that's the last thing that you wanna do. You want people to be divided. You don't want sectarian or ethnic blocks emerging. You don't want Iraq to be like Lebanon. You wanna see more cooperation across sectarian and ethnic lines and we see that emerging in Iraq. And this is what Iraq is called the blessings of ISIS, which is a shocking word to Westerners, but it's commonly used in Iraq. It forced all actors to change their calculus and we see much more cooperation and acceptance of the state as a result of that trauma of ISIS. Now there are reports of an ISIS presence between Diyala and Salahuddin. They're kind of being left alone for now for political reasons, but ISIS can't come back. I don't believe in ISIS 2.0. At most we'll see remote attacks, checkpoints, occasional car bomb, but no seizure of territory. So Iraq is likely in the past the greatest ability. There's very few actors who want to undermine that stability, like I said. The Saudis and maybe some Americans with a paranoia about Iran can still do some damage. Masoud Barazani still wants to divide Iraq, but his ability to do so has been limited. One of the challenges we'll see is that Iraqi actors, other political actors have to compromise with Barazani in terms of the elections because they can't rely on the Puk and Soleimaniya. And so they're gonna have to ally with him but he wants to divide Iraq. So there's some seeds of problems, but no major instability. You have pockets of ISIS, as I said, between Diyala, Hawija, Kirkuk, villages like Adem, Hamreen, Bukhriz, Mtebija, Zaytun, pretty remote areas. The road from Diyala to Kirkuk. Observers, Iraqi observers, often blame Barazani, the KDP, and they call these guys jokingly the Daesh Merga. So combining Peshmerga with Daesh. Rightly or wrongly, they say that this phenomenon is a result of KDP neglect or KDP provocations. I have no evidence for that. At the moment, my view is that the PMF could finish these guys in an instant if they wanted to, but they kind of want a reminder of why they exist. It benefits certain political actors in Iraq to have residual ISIS there to kind of scare people, remind people of who saved them from ISIS, in their view, the PMF actors, and also make a body look weak in terms of the elections. But anyway, this ISIS presence is not very threatening to the general order. We won't see a return of the insurgency in Anbar. There's some desert area between Fallujah and Mosul that's still a bit insecure, but it could be Highway Robbery. We have 3,000 Sunni candidates participating in the elections. They'll get between 85 to 100 seats, perhaps. As I said, even former hardliners who supported the insurgency and are tied to the rise of ISIS in 2013 and welcomed ISIS initially are now participating in the elections and the political process. I am a bit concerned about Saudi intervention and meddling, but at least the Saudis have accepted the new Iraq, and that's one of the things I'm most pleased to see. The entire region has finally accepted Iraq from Turkey to Saudi Arabia. They're cooperating with the new government. I am concerned there's this paranoia in Washington if a body doesn't become the next prime minister. Oh my God, Iran won, we lost Iraq to Iran. There's a focus on Abadi as the only option, and therefore, if it's some other candidate, you may see the anti-Iran hawks in Washington overreacting. The role of Iran will be reduced as states stabilize. I mean, Iran intervened to support central states in Iraq and Syria to help them restore sovereignty over their territory. So moving on to Syria, while in Iraq the international community assists the return of the state, in Syria we oppose the return of the state. So the return of the state in Iraq means more international support, more stability, and the more you have the state returning, the less you have ISIS. Also, the more you have the state returning in Iraq and Syria, the less you have Russia and Iran, of course. While ISIS to point always unlikely to occur in Iraq and Syria, obviously in Iraq with the return of the state plus the international assistance, the necessary steps are being taken. But in Syria, that's not being taken that we don't see a political vacuum because we see non-state governance emerging in certain areas with international support and with a strong capacity to control the population. So the Syrian government is directly or indirectly taking control over much of the country, either through military victories or through so-called reconciliations. It'll retake the remaining pockets in northern homes in the south, but we also see these emerging Turkish and American zones where you have this non-state kind of governance. Now the U.S. could have declared victory in Syria when it helped defeat ISIS and it could have left. Instead, the Trump administration made itself into a spoiler and decided we're not gonna leave, we're gonna stay and act like a small country, not like a great power because we don't want Iran and Russia to win, which means it's kind of an indefinite presence and it prevents a normalization of life in Syria. Now we don't know what American policy is. The U.S. may or may not stay in its basis throughout the Northeast. If it does stay, then the Syrian PKK, known as the PYD, is gonna grow more dependent on the U.S. and less integrated into the region, which places the Kurds of Syria in a very long-term danger because at some point the U.S. is gonna leave and the Turks or other actors just can't wait to get their hands on them. What the U.S. could be doing is encouraging the integration of the Kurds into the rest of Syria, which would reassure Turkey and prevent the eventual attack on the Kurds, which will otherwise take place. In the Northwest, we have an emerging stability with this long-term Turkish occupation of Northern Syria and the implication that the Turks are gonna be responsible for taking care of Nusrah, now known as HTS, and taking care of the foreign jihadis that are now in this Turkish colony that's being created. The Russians aren't gonna do anything about this Turkish colony because they prioritize their relationship with Turkey. They know that they can't lose Syria no matter what, so neither, as we saw with Afrin, the Russians are placing a high emphasis on maintaining the relationship with Turkey. Iran, Hezbollah don't mind this either because at least somebody is in charge of this sort of al-Qaeda zone in Northern Syria, so it appears like the Turks may end up occupying this area in the long-term, much like Israel has this long-term occupation over the Golan Heights. So we'll see a burgeon from this area, the occasional al-Qaeda attack on checkpoints, that kind of thing, but it appears to be quite stable. It's actually a free trade zone between Turkey and Syria, so everybody has an economic interest in maintaining this zone stable, including HTS or Nusrah because economically they all need this to succeed. So Syria's gonna be divided into three unless the Americans, unless Trump is sincere about his urge to leave, nobody really knows. And we'll see a direct role for foreign forces in the midterm, U.S. and Turkey, and they're embedded into the military structures in these two zones, preventing the government of Syria or the Russians from taking them. Okay, I'll stop you there, sorry. Ambassador, your response, I guess, to the quasi-competing visions of Dave and Nier, how do you see the emerging order of Iraq and its neighbors? I mean, given what we've heard from Dave and Nier, do you agree with their assessments? Where would you find, pick differences? Would I dare agree with the disagree with such experts? Well, they disagree with each other, so yeah, you can. Well, look, I mean, from an Iraqi perspective, our policy is to pursue what I'd call proactive neutrality, and the reason for that is if you look at the composition of the Iraqi population, we are a mixture, we have extensions into our neighboring countries, so we can't be part of any access with anybody against anybody, and we'd like to have as less, the least amount of tension possible. With regard to Syria, well, our position is quite clear. We support Geneva, and we would like the Syrians to be masters in their home. What the final outlook for Syria is should be the decision of the Syrian population. The main concern that the Iraqi government has is twofold. First of all, we would like to protect ourselves from the remnants of ISIS that are still in Syria. We're still getting insurgents crossing the border and doing damage to Iraqis, to Iraq, but we'd also like to see, and that's a really, are there some things, the death toll in Syria towards what has happened in Iraq, and that's not saying nothing. I mean, there's a wonderful group of people in, out in London, called Iraq Body Count, and they've tabulated the number of civilian casualties in Iraq since 2003. They're around 200,000, that'll take a few tens. In Syria, in less than half the time, we've had more than twice the number of victims. So something should be done to reduce the death toll, and whatever, from our perspective, whatever means is chosen to achieve that goal is the one we should choose. I want to pick up on the ISIS 2.0 or not. It's very difficult to pick up a magazine in town here without seeing something about ISIS 2.0. It's become kind of the next cottage industry. Dave, you seem to think that's a thing with the international and the affiliates. Of course, if we follow your analogy, the international didn't do so well after the main territorial base in the Soviet Union collapsed. Why do you disagree with Nier? Why will there be this 2.0? So I'm interested in his detailed view, but I'm not 100% sure we really disagree, right? Because the point that I made was that whether you think it's post-ISIS or not depends on what you mean by ISIS. And I think if we're talking about the territorial caliphate, the controlled cities in Drove-Ran and T-55s and all that in Iraq and Syria, that's not coming back. I don't think we're gonna see the re-emergence of that. But in Somalia, in Libya, in Cameroon, in Nigeria, in Turkey, in Europe, we have the, if you like, the ideas and the innovations and the ideology and the structure that was pioneered by that territorial state is now sort of free-floating. We haven't really talked about Afghanistan, but it was covered in a previous panel. But the emergence of ISIS or ISPK in Afghanistan is another example where it sort of lives on after the death of the caliphate. I also really like Nia's ecological analogy. Two people that you should read if you have are Raif Sagaran, who's unfortunately dead now, and Dominic Johnson from the UK, who've both written about the mathematical application of Darwinian evolutionary theory to insurgent groups. And there's actually fairly good evidence to suggest that natural selection processes work on a population of insurgents much like they do on any other population. And in this case, there's also artificial selection because we're picking people and whacking them and that's having an improving effect on the population that we're dealing with. The stupid and the unlucky don't make it and the guys that survive to the next round, the better guys. And what we've done here, and in particular, if we pull out of Syria too early, we'll be like taking antibiotics and then stopping the course before you're finished and you end up with a drug-resistant strain that comes back stronger than ever. So will they run around with tanks and control cities? I don't think so, but I don't think they're gone. So, and I wouldn't say it's ISIS 2.0, it's about ISIS five or six now at this point. So we don't disagree, it won't be ISIS because ISIS is the Islamic State in Iraq and Shem. That's dead. However, certainly the Islamic State in Cameroon, Mali, Algeria, Afghanistan, it may not seize vast amount of territory but we're likely to see violence inspired by that for a long time. But the reason why there won't be an ISIS 2.0 in Syria and Iraq requires understanding what led to the rise of ISIS in the first place. It wasn't just Maliki's a bad guy, he's oppressing Sunnis, Sunnis get angry, they join ISIS. This is a caricature that is very commonly seen here in D.C. First of all, in the Maliki days, it was quite mixed. In Anbar, you didn't see Shia forces, you saw the economy was doing great. In 2012, you saw six ministers, I think, from Anbar in Maliki's government. They didn't have any legitimate grievances against the government that any other Iraqi wouldn't have. In Mosul, the relationship with the Iraqi army was very tense and it was quite different. But there was something happening in the region in 2012 and 13 which led to the rise of ISIS. It was a perfect storm in that you had this phenomenon wrongly called the Arab Spring but these Arab uprisings taking on a Sunni sectarian element in certain countries and it gave the defeated insurgency in Iraq the hope that Dixie will rise again, so to speak. And much for the same reason that many Trump voters were unhappy with having a black president in the U.S. And that was one of their main motivations perhaps. You saw a similar phenomenon in Iraq. Some people just refused to accept that there could be a Shia leader in Iraq and I think in Anbar that may have been the case. And there was a move, Syria's gonna fall to a Sunni insurgency and we can perhaps undo this historical injustice of having a Shia leader's government imposed on us in Iraq and you had support coming in from the Gulf, from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to various actors in Iraq but most importantly was the poorest Turkish-Syrian border. There wouldn't have been an ISIS 1.0 were it not for the Turkish-Syrian border where you had thousands of foreign fighters coming in seizing control of this area which the U.S. is very much implicated in creating a failed state zone. You're receiving support from jihadists around the world and basically invading Iraq and seizing control of much of Iraq through this failed state that had been created in Syria. So now you have the region is entirely against these days this kind of phenomenon. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are competing to see who's more anti-terrorist these days. There's nobody supporting internally or externally this kind of Sunni extremist language. The move is towards restoring state sovereignty. The experience of ISIS was so brutal for most of the people living under its control that we now see them wanting revenge whether in the Kurdish areas of northeastern Syria or on Bahrainina where people want revenge against families of ISIS guys even. There's been a real backlash against it. So this is again part of that so-called blessings of ISIS that I referred to. Great. I think with that we'll go to the audience we're almost out of time so. If I may just say one. Sure, I'm sorry go ahead. Following up on your one thing that is always underestimated is the role of states in terrorism. I really believe that terrorism is a state industry. It's very expensive to get all these weapons and all this training. Why don't we search for the states behind the terrorist? I mean Jabhat al-Nusrah had multiple plastic surgery so that it can fit within the Saudi coalition supported it. I mean with that states unless we face these states. That's it. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for the great panel. So much expertise on the floor today. All of you are wonderful to hear from. I really had to sort of puzzle over the Turkey, Russia, Iran access concept. It's really quite something to really think about because historically speaking we know these types of accesses what they usually lead up to is a much more embroiled state for the entire world. So I want to ask the question actually you provoked this thought in me Dave. You know is it an access in which it could be operable if it's Erdogan's Turkey or is it anybody's Turkey that that access needs to sort of be to have it be in play? Do you know what I mean? Like essentially the one difference between Russia and Iran those are fairly stable authoritarian states. Erdogan may or may not stay forever and certainly there's a little bit more flexibility in the system there. So I wonder whether or not that access power would hold long term. I think that's a great question. I don't know if I know the answer to it. I mean I think obviously Turkey now is a very different country in some ways than it was before the coup attempt but in other ways it's still very similar and it still has the same geopolitical interests in the region that it had in 2015 when it was trying to achieve a rather similar territorial buffer to what we're seeing now. So my current impression is that this access that we're seeing emerges really around the Astana process. That's what I call it the Astana access. It's about coming to a political resolution of the conflict in Syria and maybe depending on what we think is gonna happen with that it will either hold together or break apart once that reaches some kind of resolution. So I think I'm sort of taking a watching brief at the moment on where that's going. I think it has really significant geopolitical implications for the region as I said. It also has some pretty major military implications for NATO and others but I'm not sure it's necessarily a threatening development in itself. It's just that it's like the rise of Kurdistan. It changes a lot of things that we sort of took for granted and causes things to realign. So short answers, I don't know. Maybe just a brief comment on that. From a regional point of view this not from an American point of view perhaps this is a positive development. This is a countries of the region cooperating to tackle common threats. Now Turkey's policy changed and Turkey was contributing for a long time to instability for several years at least 2011 to 2015 maybe. But now we see Turkey, Russia and Iran cooperating in favor of stability and in a sense to counter some of the American blunders which have led to greater instability. You could include supporting the PKK in the absence of a larger strategy as part of that which is obviously very alarming to Turkey destabilizing the state in Syria leading to the rise of ISIS and other actors of great concern to Russia and Iran. So we might not like these actors but they're acting, these are local actors acting to provide a local stability in areas where the US only has a limited and perhaps temporary interest. Great, one more quick question. Yeah, David right here. Thanks, David Sturman with New America. My question is ISIS in the period leading up to its declaration of the Caliphate did a masterful job of stitching together whole bunch of regional grievances into its master narrative. I think we've really to a large extent taken that master narrative for granted. I'm wondering to what extent is the US in a position to once again push down these sort of various conflicts in the region you point to back into local complaints and is the US even capable of resolving 20 odd or keeping on a low burn 20 odd local conflicts or is it inevitable that the master narrative will reemerge, thanks. Nadi? You know in my security studies course that I teach at Kansas State University I teach a brilliant book called Master Narratives of Islamic Extremists. Actually the authors are from ASU and it's brilliant, I highly recommend it. And David pointed out to something really important and again it is related to ideas which are always like too simple too easy let's just do it the hard way, the military way. But the master narrative of the Caliphate, this idea that if only we have a Caliphate we in the Arab world and the Muslim world will have no problems, no unemployment, everything will be great, will be a military power so nobody can bully us and how do we get there? How do we get there the first time? You know you kill pillage, maim and slave your way through it but it works, it worked before. So let's have a Caliphate again. So how do we deconstruct this? If we're serious about deconstructing this this has never actually been scrutinized because we do not have the space where ideas can compete and where we can really scrutinize history. It's not so simple. It wasn't the killing and pillaging and conquering that actually created that. There's a myriad of reasons and specific moments that that was possible then and we are as previous panelists pointed out we are at a time where it's not okay to conquer other countries. So come up with something different, it's not okay to use violence. And Nair mentioned the Arab Spring. When we talk about the Arab Spring that is a movement that was very peaceful that toppled five regimes and no terrorists have record of toppling five regimes but the counter revolution which is real which is state run just like a lot of terrorism. It's the state industry. The counter revolution both by Islamist and state use the only mechanism violence or the threat of violence. And unless we remove violence as an option as a legitimate option there's no way we're gonna solve these problems. I'll let Ambassador Farid have the last words since we're out of time. Well ISIS and their ideology are totalitarians and totalitarians don't engage in debates. And their narratives stumble and fall when they meet the test of reality when people reject them. Look at Mosul right now. It's alive and doing well. The real issue now is emerging is preventing people who will follow these ideologies who are always there. I mean we still have neo Nazi groups even though the Reich would destroy it 70 years ago. You have these ideologies all over the place what we need to do is to prevent them from getting together from aggregating from developing the tools that allow them to have global propaganda and global recruitment which is something that Iraq suffered from. I'm talking about social media networks. Something needs to be done to police them. I'm using this word advisedly. Thank you. All right thank you. Ambassador Nadia and Dave Nier. Thank you very much. Thank you.