When asked about how he plans to confront ISIS in Syria, President Barack Obama made a stunning admission saying, “We don’t have a strategy yet”. He said this at a time when the intelligence community is reporting a “significant increase” in terror chatter as the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches.

Reasons why Obama has no strategy for dealing with ISIS are varied but as Shoebat.com has reported, chief among them likely involves Turkey. As evidence becomes increasingly overwhelming that Turkey has a lot riding on the ISIS horse in Syria, the U.S. is in a bigger and bigger pinch.

Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants Bashar al-Assad gone. The best way to ensure that happens is for the U.S. to let ISIS make that happen. A defeat of ISIS by the U.S. would be a defeat for NATO ‘ally’ Turkey.

Reports also suggest that Erdogan is increasingly angry with the Obama administration and that the two haven’t spoken since February as Shoebat.com reported. In the minds of the neo-Ottomanists like Erdogan, Assad should have been removed a long time ago and it’s the U.S. which hasn’t been able to make that happen. Erdogan would see any successful Obama ‘strategy’ to deal with ISIS as another thumb in the eye to Turkey.

The Benghazi attack two years ago reportedly ended a covert weapons trafficking operation that shipped weapons to the Syrian rebels; this is said to have angered Erdogan. Then after attempts by Turkey to get Obama to declare Assad had crossed the ‘red line’, the best opportunity to get Obama to take the bait came last August with the chemical attack in Ghouta.

That didn’t work either. Credible reports suggest Turkey was behind it in an attempt to frame Assad and create the political appetite for finishing him off; that didn’t happen.

Seymour Hersh put it this way:

Barring a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the Syrian civil war is likely to go on. ‘I asked my colleagues if there was any way to stop Erdoğan’s continued support for the rebels, especially now that it’s going so wrong,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The answer was: “We’re screwed.” We could go public if it was somebody other than Erdoğan, but Turkey is a special case. They’re a Nato ally. The Turks don’t trust the West. They can’t live with us if we take any active role against Turkish interests. If we went public with what we know about Erdoğan’s role with the gas, it’d be disastrous. The Turks would say: “We hate you for telling us what we can and can’t do.”’

Conversely, anxieties in the U.S. are mounting over ISIS so political pressure is building to force Obama to do something.

Whatever that is, the political pressure coming from Turkey will be to do something completely different.