This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 21st, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The US shot down a Syrian jet over the weekend and it signals nothing good either about the Trump administration's

willingness to expand war or the apparent willingness of the Trump Pentagon to engage in

hostilities with pretty much anyone in Syria.

Emma Ashford comments.

There's been a couple of incidents in Syria

over the last three to four weeks.

The most recent was this weekend where the US Navy plane actually shot down a plane

associated with the Assad regime. That's the first time we have shot down a plane

in air-to-air combat in at least 15 years.

And so there have been several incidents like that where US forces on the ground inside

Syria are now targeting not just ISIS, not just other terrorist groups,

but they're actually targeting forces associated with the Assad regime and that's actually

kind of a big shift and it's not being matched by any discussion of why

we're making that shift. The reason being that Assad himself is fighting ISIS.

I mean that's got to be part of it.

Certainly the Assad regime has a patchy history of fighting ISIS. They say that they're doing

it, they say they're fighting terrorists and and sometimes they are, like they retook the ruins

at Pomera from ISIS. A lot of the time the regime is also targeting civilians or rebel groups

when they say they're fighting terrorists.

So it gets very fuzzy.

...