hezbollah against the islamic state. the islamic state is being largely defeated by american backed kurdish forces and iranian backed shiia militia. it s turned into a disaster, creating a failed state on iran s border. the shiites in lebanon did not take the bait and so far they have seen the responsible party refusing to plunge the country into instability. but everywhere in the middle east, tensions are rising, sectarianism is gaining ground, and with a couple of miscalculations or accidents, things could spiral out of control. and with donald trump having firmly supported this saudi strady, america could find itself dragged deeper into the
arthel: secretary of state rex tillerson in saudi arabia. he s meeting with the saudi king and iraq s prime minister trying to broker a new alliance aimed at countering iran s growing influence in the region. conor powell is live with the details. reporter: secretary of state tillerson was last in the region in july. they have grown worse in the last few months being problems for the administration. he s trying to convince iraq to distance itself from iran. the trump administration has aligned itself with the sunni-arab bloc. but like iran, iraq is a shiia
we re not going to convert them to oh, maybe democracy is the way to go. neil: they re like cockroaches. you kill one and more come out. they do. it s like nailing jell-o to the wall. we re hating places that they re training. they re having a tough time training them as well. they ll keep moving around and disappear into the desert. now we re going to get into the s sunni and shiia. think of the sunny that were following they re. they re looking to supporters and get the shiia violence back to them. you have to involve the kurds and the forces and how do you keep track of this? when you gunned down osama bin laden, it was a huge achievement. didn t you think this would go on? there would be other players?
forces reached the tigris river. initially caused extremists to this group, unnerved the shiia after years of being repressed against the majority. to bring this city back into the fold again, to build again, and we ll see some new sort of it s sits come forward, but that is the future s challenges, today we have dealing with perhaps a momentous moment in iraq, where the offshoots of ideology and terror attacks, in the uk, paris, london, brussels, i could go on. but today face an enormous
and russia that this is not something we re going to put up with, so i would like to say that the president saved many innocent men, women and children. so threats from the trump administration about more u.s. strikes against bashar al assad s regime of launching chemical weapons attacks? i think it s what we have to do and that s a significant statement by ambassador haley, and we have to upheld the international position on chemical weapons, so i think trump is right to warn them, but he has to have a larger strategy because we have seen this big power play by iran over the last couple of weeks, they re gaining territory, from the shiia groups in iran. they want to connect iran and syria and lebanon.