n early June 2014 I was attending a conference in the Jordanian capital Amman about the war in Syria. I was arguing that the most important development in Syria was the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which was freely carrying out military operations in an enormous area reaching from the Iranian border almost to the Mediterranean. The jihadi militants had captured Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, in January and the 350,000-strong Iraqi Army had been unable to launch a successful counter-attack and win it back. I sensed a certain restrained impatience among the Syrian experts who listened politely to what I had to say, but by and large did not seem to take my point very seriously. I had had a somewhat similar response at two conferences I had attended in London earlier in the year and I was beginning to wonder if there was something in the situation that I was missing.
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