Hillary Clinton: Not helping the Syrian rebels is what allowed ISIS to grow
![Hillary Clinton: Not helping the Syrian rebels is what allowed ISIS to grow](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/DKDDYV3PQAx277kmfXsEAN-415-80.jpg)
In an interview with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg published Sunday, Hillary Clinton discussed everything from President Obama's approach to foreign policy to the way Israel is losing its "PR battle."
Regarding Syria and the rise of Islamist fighters, Clinton said:
The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad — there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle — the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled. They were often armed in an indiscriminate way by other forces and we had no skin in the game that really enabled us to prevent this indiscriminate arming. [The Atlantic]
Clinton said she is also worried about what is happening in the Middle East because of the "breakout capacity of jihadist groups" that "are governing territory" but "are driven to expand:"
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Their raison d'être is to be again the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank — and we all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I'm thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat. [The Atlantic]
As for the conflict in Gaza, Clinton said: "Hamas paints itself as the defender of the rights of the Palestinians to have their own state. So that PR battle is one that is historically tilted against Israel." Clinton also touched on Iran and its nuclear program, noting that she'd "always been in the camp that held that they did not have a right to enrichment," adding that Iran's claim to such a right is "absolutely unfounded. There is no such right."
Read the entire interview at The Atlantic.
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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