PORTLAND, Maine - More than 100 Portland area community members and students packed a hall at the University of Southern Maine to discuss the grave situation in Iraq and Syria, and talk about the U.S. response. The so-called "teach-in" titled "Shifting Alliances: Isis in Iraq and Syria," featured four Maine-based experts on the region, who were on hand to answer questions from the crowd.
What is the U.S. doing in Syria? Why doesn't Turkey do more to help in the fight on its border against the Islamic State terror movement, known as ISIS? What should America's next step be? And this query from USM graduate Yusuf Mohamed: "Now that we're involved in Syria and Iraq in deciding to eradicate ISIS once and for all, where do you envision the next step for creating a stabilized environment to find peace?"
"Well I don't really have an answer about the future on what United States should do," responded Senem Aslan, who teaches in the Politics Department at Bates College.
"People have a very shallow understanding of the Middle East," Aslan says. "It's so complicated, you know, the relationships."
Aslan - who's about to publish a book on nation-building in Turkey and Morroco - says Turkey's reluctance to become directly involved in the fight against ISIS has to do with its concerns about the threat from Kurdish separatists, who have been at war with Turkey for years.
As for U.S. policy towards the region, "I have very mixed feelings about some of the plans, like arming the moderate forces," Aslan says. "I'm very skeptical about this. I don't know who these moderates are and what the unintended consequences will be."
Aslan also expressed doubt as to the long-term usefulness of U.S.-led airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq.
Another panelist, though, had more immediate concerns, and a clear message to the American people: "I think there is a moral obligation by the U.S. as the supreme power, as power number one, economically speaking, militarily speaking," said Ali Al Mshakheel, a journalist and public relations specialist who came to Portland in March as a refugee from Iraq, where he witnessed first hand the rise of ISIS.
Like many Iraqis, he says he's wary of a U.S. ground troop presence in the region, but he sees U.S. military help, both direct and indirect, as essential to saving lives. He hit back against some suggestions in the press recently that ISIS is a group that can be negotiated with.
"I described them like a moving chemical cloud that is eliminating everything in its way," he said, "And I think the American audience need to know about them."
Dealing with the ISIS threat is likely to be a challenge for many years to come, warns Professor Ali Ahmida of the University of New England. Nor can the conflict be regarded as a localized effort, he says, because of the group's global reach when it comes to recruiting fighters. "The consequences of this violent group might not be just regional, it might be international," he said.
More generalized questions also were asked about the Islamic religion, and America's view of Islam. Reza Jalali - who organized the teach-in - is co-ordinator of multi-cultural affairs at USM and an Iranian Kurd by origin.
"I would say Islam is the religion of some 1.5 - 1.6 billion, very peaceful people - and then there's political Islam," Jalali said. And it's this highly politicized form of Islam, he said, that tends to make news headlines, both in the U.S. and across the world.
