I don’t understand how an official like the US Secretary of State John Kerry could say that Bashar Assad could be accepted because he needed him in the fight against the terrorist organization, Islamic State (IS).

Kerry’s statement is enough to push millions of people here to support the IS. If Kerry’s excuse is that he will cooperate with Assad because he despises IS, then millions of Syrians will cooperate with IS because they despise Assad.

And these Syrian people’s justifications are greater than Kerry’s excuse. The Assad regime, aided by his allies — the Iranians and Hezbollah — has killed more than a quarter of a million people. It’s impossible for them to reconcile with him regardless of what the American justifications are.

Does Kerry think that millions of Syrians will remain silent and forget about the massacres and displacement?

Despite many of his slips, Kerry’s latest statements were his worst. This is regardless of whether they were simply made to please Iran into signing a nuclear deal or whether they were the result of an advice by his advisers who care little about the plight of the Syrian people.

The fundamental rule in the fight against IS is making sure it is confronted locally. This could be done by getting regional people together to cooperate, since IS poses a threat to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Without regional cooperation, no one will be able to defeat terrorist groups, which attract volunteers and donors with claims of standing against tyrant.

So how can the region’s governments convince their citizens otherwise when the US key official publicly announces that he’d negotiate with and accept the worst regime the region has known — especially when this regime has done worse than Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq and worse than Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in Libya?

If the aim of his statement is to please the Iranians, the American government must think twice, because this harms everything it has built over long decades.

And it also subjects its interests to bigger threats and poses a threat to the region. In the end, the US will get nothing but more regional problems from the Iranians, the Syrian regime and Hezbollah.

Kerry has heralded the gates of hell on himself and his country in an angry region, where most of its people feel that Obama’s administration has been silent over daily crimes of genocide, in which forbidden chemical weapons have been used, and has also prohibited arming the opposition with qualitative weapons and now wants to reconcile with murderers in broad daylight.