Destroying Hamas would only create another ‘Islamic State’ – top Pentagon official ― RT News
A grim and unpredictable future could befall the Middle East if Hamas is destroyed, a top Pentagon official said, warning that another rampaging extremist group akin to the Islamic State terrorists could rise up in its place.
While Lt. General Michael Flynn criticized Hamas for exhausting finite resources of the Gaza Strip to build a network of tunnels for the purpose of fighting Israel, he nevertheless said that destroying the group would only lead to a widening of the regional conflict and probably an extremist group fighting in its stead.
"If Hamas were destroyed and gone, we would probably end up with something much worse. The region would end up with something much worse," Reuters quoted the outgoing head of the Defense Intelligence Agency as saying on Saturday at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.
The Lt. General then envisioned an Iraq/Syria scenario, where large swathes of northern territories have fallen under control of the Islamist fighters of the Islamic Caliphate: “A worse threat that would come into the sort of ecosystem there… something like ISIS.”