Ryan Zinke Quotes

Both sides in Syria are bad. One side is a brutal dictator, and the other includes Islamists and terrorists who are dangerous already and who would be brutal in power if given the chance.

Why is Assad more responsible for all the deaths in Syria than those fighting to overthrow and kill him?

The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we're seeing 100,000 victims per month.

Syria cannot continue this way—killing their people

Syria has become the great tragedy of the century—a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history.

Syria: It’s a messy civil war and we should not be involved in it.

Bashar Assad's power over the areas of Syria under government control is slipping. Armed militias are growing stronger and the country's dictator can do nothing to stop them. Now, these fighters are taking over control in many areas, committing murder, looting and harassing civilians. And nobody can stop them, not even Assad himself. Indeed, the militias are now more powerful than even the country's dictator and have become the real holders of power in Syria.

We have a failed state in Syria.

The Sunni militants that make up ISIS are not the underlying problem in Syria and Iraq, but rather they are a symptom of other deeper problems.

I am absolutely not saying that Milosevic might not be responsible for all sorts of atrocities, but I believe that what's been left out of public debate and the press is that there was a civil war going on there.

If Assad continues to conduct strikes against the Free Syrian Army at will, it would be very difficult for them to have any success against ISIS.

Like a nuclear disaster, the fallout from the meltdown of Syria threatens to be with us for decades, and the longer it is permitted to continue, the more severe the damage will be.

Indeed, by refusing to tackle Assad's brutality, we may actively alienate more of the Sunni population, driving them towards ISIS.

Assad's brutality has nurtured extremism and been its main recruiting sergeant.

We warned when the crisis began in 2011 that unless it was resolved quickly, the country [Syria] would be destroyed. Unfortunately, our warnings are coming true.

This is a big deal. My wife and I sat in our home and we watched those young men get slaughtered on the streets of Mogadishu in the absence of a plan. It broke our heart.

The fate of Syria hangs in the balance, but it is entirely possible that the fall of the Assad regime will result in anarchy and cause Syria to turn into a second Afghanistan, a base for anti-Israel terrorism.

Iraq is in a civil war. There is no road in that country that is safe.

The understanding of Syria's devastating civil war has been distorted by the immense danger and difficulty of covering it.

We've got a very difficult situation created by this embrace of the so-called Arab Spring. And that's not getting better. It's getting worse. The carnage for the people of Syria is horrific, and it's quite frankly too little, too late to reverse a lot of that.

Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.

At least 23,000 civilians have also died in the Iraqi killing field and the U.S. is stuck in a quagmire.

The Iraqi government will try and retake some of the cities have that been captured by ISIS. That means the Shiite government dropping bombs on civilian areas, on Sunni cities. There will likely be a response with car bombings here in Baghdad, and this could be a long fight.

The north of the Central African Republic is now a war zone, with rival armed bands burning villages, kidnapping children, robbing travelers and killing people with impunity.

Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of [Syrian] depravity sinks lower.