USIP Middle East and Africa Center Vice President Mike Yaffe spoke to SiriusXM POTUS Ch. 124 about increased U.S. engagement in Syria and the role of other outside players including Russia, Turkey and Iran.

That’s why initiatives such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, President George W. Bush’s landmark initiative to curb HIV infections, are so important. It’s why relatively small programs such as the U.S. Institute of Peace and the East-West Center can have a big impact on foreign views of the U.S.

With the missile strikes — retalia­tion for the Assad regime’s suspect­ed role in a chemical weapons at­tack — US President Donald Trump grabbed the attention of the players in the Syrian crisis. Elie Abouaoun, director of Middle East and Africa Programmes at the US Institute of Peace, a non-partisan think-tank, said the attack on the al-Shayrat air­base told Moscow: “We are back on stage. You are not alone anymore.”

Taylor said Manafort visited him regularly in Kiev, Ukraine's capital. "He was very transparent about his policy recommendations and political recommendations and style recommendations to Yanukovych," recalled Taylor, now the executive vice president of the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington.

U.S. Institute of Peace Executive Vice President William B. Taylor appeared on BBC World News America to discuss ISIS in Afghanistan and the Trump Administration’s strategy review being led by National Security Advisory H.R. McMaster. Taylor underscored that military options in Afghanistan and the Middle East need to be complemented by a corresponding political strategy.

Syria’s Christians are part of a mass exodus taking place throughout the Middle East, the cradle of the faith. Today, Christians are only about four per cent of the region’s more than four hundred million people—and probably less. They “have been subject to vicious murders at the hands of terrorist groups, forced out of their ancestral lands by civil wars, suffered societal intolerance fomented by Islamist groups, and subjected to institutional discrimination found in the legal codes and official practices of many Middle Eastern countries,” as several fellows at the Center for American Progress put it.

Efforts to dismantle ISIS strongholds have been concentrated in Iraq and Syria. But a small stronghold of fighters made up of former Taliban members has grown in eastern Afghanistan since 2014. The group is known as Islamic State Khorasan, according to a U.S. Institute for Peace report released in November.

“By NATO's own estimates, it's something like 800 fighters countrywide, a big drop over past year,” Colin Cookman, an Afghanistan expert at the United States Institute of Peace, tweeted.