According to a new research, at least 15 rebel forces in Syria are ready to succeed ISIS if it is defeated by the US-led coalition.
The Centre on Religion & Geopolitics, linked to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, also says that 60% of the rebels could be classified as Islamists.
It argues that attempts by world powers to distinguish between moderate and extremist factions are flawed.
Western countries have stepped up air strikes against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
But the Centre on Religion and Geopolitics said the greatest danger to the international community was groups who share the ISIS ideology but are currently being ignored.
They number about 100,000 fighters, the centre said.
“The West risks making a strategic failure by focusing only on ISIS,” the centre said.
“Defeating it militarily will not end global jihadism. We cannot bomb an ideology, but our war is ideological.”
If ISIS is defeated, dispersed fighters and other extremists could attack targets outside Syria under a rallying cry that “the West destroyed the Caliphate”, the centre warned.
Such new groups could compete for the spotlight to ensure allegiance from the global fighters and financing that ISIS currently attracts.
By contrast, fewer than a quarter of the rebels surveyed were not ideological, the centre said.
But many of those were willing to fight alongside extremists and would probably accept an Islamist political settlement to the civil war, it claimed.
In response, the military campaign against ISIS must be accompanied by an “intellectual and theological defeat of the pernicious ideology that drives it”, the centre said.
It also said that unless President Bashar al-Assad leaves or is removed from office, the war in Syria is likely to spread further.
Tony Blair strongly denied outrageous internet rumors today linking him with the divorce of Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng.
The internet was awash with unfounded suggestions that the former British Prime Minister may have been romantically involved with 44-year-old Wendi Deng, who is a close friend.
The feverish speculation followed a Twitter claim by BBC business editor Robert Peston, who has close links with Murdoch empire insiders, that he had been “told that undisclosed reasons for Murdoch divorcing Deng are jaw-dropping – & hate myself for wanting to know what they are”.
The rumors are understood to have been emphatically rejected by Tony Blair aides as untrue – either now or in the past – and also as highly defamatory.
A spokesman for Tony Blair told the Hollywood Reporter: “If you are asking if they are having an affair, the answer is no.”
The spokesman said Tony Blair would not be making a public comment on the divorce himself.
With no explanation forthcoming from the Murdoch camp, rumors started flying within hours of the bombshell news that the media tycoon had filed for divorce in a New York court, ending his 14 years marriage to his third wife.
It is no secret that the ambitious Wendi Deng and Tony Blair are good friends. He is godfather to Grace, her older child with 82-year-old Rupert Murdoch.
Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff described Tony Blair as “one of Wendi’s first official social conquests” and suggested that the former prime minister had seen her as a key link in his efforts to woo her politically powerful husband.
Rupert Murdoch, who is estimated to be worth nearly $11 billion, cited as grounds for the divorce “that the relationship has broken down irretrievably”.
Tony Blair strongly denied outrageous internet rumors today linking him with the divorce of Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng
Insiders said the marriage has actually been strained for years. Some pointed to an article in the New York Times last year in which Wendi Deng’s friends admitted the Murdochs were living “largely separate lives” as she looked after their two children and played the socialite while her husband ran his huge media business.
They reportedly came close to splitting up as long ago as 2006 when Wendi Deng reacted with fury to Rupert Murdoch’s decision that their two young daughters, Grace and Chloe, would not have the same say over the running of the family media empire as his children from previous marriages.
Rupert Murdoch’s biographer Neil Chenoweth suggested that the media mogul had planned the divorce as long ago as February after the death of his mother two months earlier gave him extra shares in the family business that he could use to pay off his wife.
In the same month, observers of the couple at the Oscars saw a noticeable change in Wendi Deng’s behavior towards her husband.
“She was snippy with him during the Oscar weekend and she’s really impatient with him these days,” a source at the time told Deadline Hollywood, a film industry website which first reported the divorce.
Michael Wolff recalled reports that Rupert Murdoch told his oldest son, Lachlan, some years ago that he had concluded that marrying the fiery Wendi Deng was a “mistake”.
Other sources claimed the workaholic Rupert Murdoch was more concerned with the imminent division of his media empire into publishing and entertainment arms than with his split from his wife.
Although the couple have a pre-nuptial agreement which should ensure that the Murdoch business empire is not affected by the split, their settlement will have to sort out what happens to their seven homes.
They include a Manhattan apartment Rupert Murdoch bought for $45 million, a 16-acre vineyard in Los Angeles, a flat in London’s Mayfair, an 11-bedroom house in Beverly Hills and a period house outside the Forbidden City in Beijing.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2000 that Wendi Deng helped break up the marriage of an American couple, Jake and Joyce Cherry, who had befriended her.
In 1988, they arranged for Wendi Deng, then aged 19, to leave China for Los Angeles to learn English.
Wendi Deng reportedly ran off with 53-year-old Jake Cherry and later married him, enabling her to get a “green card” to work in the US. The marriage soon ended after Jake Cherry discovered Wendi Deng was spending time with a man nearly half his age, said the Journal.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said that Tony Blair and George W. Bush should be taken to the International Criminal Court in The Hague over the Iraq war.
Writing in the UK’s Observer newspaper, Desmond Tutu accused the former leaders of lying about weapons of mass destruction.
The Iraq military campaign had made the world more unstable “than any other conflict in history”, he said.
Tony Blair responded by saying “this is the same argument we have had many times with nothing new to say”.
Earlier this week, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a veteran peace campaigner who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 in recognition of his campaign against apartheid, pulled out of a leadership summit in Johannesburg because he refused to share a platform with Tony Blair.
The former Archbishop of Cape Town said the US- and UK-led action launched against Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 had brought about conditions for the civil war in Syria and a possible Middle East conflict involving Iran.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said that Tony Blair and George W. Bush should be taken to the International Criminal Court in The Hague over the Iraq war
“The then leaders of the United States [George Bush] and Great Britain [Tony Blair] fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the specter of Syria and Iran before us,” he said.
He added: “The question is not whether Saddam Hussein was good or bad or how many of his people he massacred. The point is that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair should not have allowed themselves to stoop to his immoral level.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu said the death toll as a result of military action in Iraq since 2003 was grounds for Tony Blair and George Bush to be tried in The Hague.
But he said different standards appeared to be applied to Western leaders.
He said: “On these grounds, alone, in a consistent world, those responsible should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in The Hague.”
In response to Sunday’s article, Tony Blair issued a strongly worded defence of his decisions.
Tony Blair said: “To repeat the old canard that we lied about the intelligence [on weapons of mass destruction] is completely wrong as every single independent analysis of the evidence has shown.
“And to say that the fact that Saddam massacred hundreds of thousands of his citizens is irrelevant to the morality of removing him is bizarre.
“We have just had the memorials both of the Halabja massacre, where thousands of people were murdered in one day by Saddam’s use of chemical weapons, and that of the Iran-Iraq war where casualties numbered up to a million, including many killed by chemical weapons.
“In addition, his slaughter of his political opponents, the treatment of the Marsh Arabs and the systematic torture of his people make the case for removing him morally strong. But the basis of action was as stated at the time.”
He added: “In short this is the same argument we have had many times with nothing new to say. But surely in a healthy democracy people can agree to disagree.
“I would also point out that despite the problems, Iraq today has an economy three times or more in size, with child mortality rate cut by a third of what it was. And with investment hugely increased in places like Basra.”
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