I am a regular HN user and sometimes commentator. I am Muslim, both by background and choice. I am glad that HN is having a conversation a 100 times more serious and intellectual than I am seeing on popular Western and Muslim media.<p>First of all Daesh are a bunch of psychopaths and a far greater threat and problem to people like me. Their every move has been against not just non-Muslims or moderate Muslims but also and even more so against mainstream and all major currents of Sunni Islam. If people are interested, I can provide specific sources to support this assertion.<p>From the Muslim world side, we have a huge mess. I wanted to put in my two cents for Westerners trying to understand WTH is going on with the Muslim world. Basically, the Assad regime, nominally &quot;secular, progressive&quot; tyrants such as the Egyptian and Algerian militaries or Kurdish marxist armies, numerous &quot;radical&quot; Sunni and Shia groups have all been at fault since they could not agree on a set of principles on which disagreeing parties could come to peace. The long Iraqi civil war brutalised already damaged societies. This produced the sort of psychopaths such as Zarqawi and Baghdadi and numerous others. Also, even otherwise somewhat moderate Sunnis have been driven into ISIS&#x27;s arms and somewhat moderate Nusayrites and Shi&#x27;ites have been driven into Ass&#x27;ads arms because they don&#x27;t see another option. The biggest problem now is that while many people are disgusted by all this, there is so much blame to go around that one can be completely justified in blaming everyone else. So the problem is that people sympathetic to Assad (old-style socialists, Shi&#x27;ites etc.) sit there blaming the Saudis, Turks and the &quot;West&quot; for the supporting rebels who they say are all Daesh. On the other hand, Assad has killed and driven out many times more refugees than Daesh, and many Syrians and Sunnis find it hypocritical and self-serving to support Assad like Putin is doing while neglecting the plight of the Syrian population being hammered both from Assad and Daesh. The conspiracy theorist streak finds it easy to blame the US, without trying to eliminate the local actors who are instruments of said conspiracy, if they really believe there is one.<p>Unless all sides are brave enough to not only fight for their principles but more importantly admit their own mistakes it is hard to fix this. But this requires some trust, which only gets harder to find the more precarious your own situation becomes.