Members of the Syrian Coalition's Washington D.C. office are feeling "frustration" and "depression" after the announcement that the U.S. will conduct limited military operations in an effort to protect U.S. personnel and prevent further genocide in Iraq. 

Oubai Shahbandar, the Coalition's communications adviser, told Think Progress that the atrocities being committed by ISIS in Iraq are no more egregious, and potentially far less so, than the systematic elimination of Syrian civilians being perpetrated by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which garnered publicity last week when photos taken by a military defector known as "Cesar" were made public:

"At the same time, while we heard condemnation and horror at the photos and the evidence from military defector ‘Caesar’ showing an industrial and systemic effort to eradicate tens of thousands of Syrian civilians, rows and rows of emaciated bodies,” Shahbandar said, “we didn’t hear a single viewpoint that declared this effort by the Assad regime ‘genocide,’ despite the eerie parallels."