Special to WorldTribune.com

The former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan believes moderate fighters of Al Qaida’s Nusra Front can be enlisted to battle Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) in Syria.

Retired Army general and former CIA Director David Petraeus is advocating a strategy similar to one he employed in 2007 in Iraq, when the U.S. persuaded Sunni militias to stop fighting with Al Qaida and to work with the American military, sources close to Petraeus told The Daily Beast.

The sources said that Petraeus believes Nusra Front members who don’t share Al Qaida’s Islamist philosophy and others who are trying to bring down the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad could be convinced to join the fight against ISIL.

Some observers say the Petraeus strategy is already a no-go as the Obama administration has designated Nusra Front a terrorist organization and in 2014 President Barack Obama ordered airstrikes on Nusra targets suspected of housing members of the Khorasan Group, an Al Qaida affiliate that was trying to recruit terrorists with Western passports to smuggle bombs onto civilian airliners.

Still, some observers are also willing to listen to Petraeus as Obama’s ISIL strategy has failed miserably.

This is an acknowledgment that U.S. stated goal to degrade and destroy ISIL is not working. If it were, we would not be talking to these not quite foreign terrorist groups, Christopher Harmer, a senior naval analyst with the Middle East Security Project at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War, told The Daily Beast. Strategically, it is desperate.

In 2011, when the war in Syria began, Petraeus, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta are said to have urged Obama to work with moderate opposition forces.

Obama didn’t, and many of those moderates have since joined up with jihadist groups like Nusra Front.

As prospects for Assad dim, opposition groups not already aligned with the U.S. or our partners will face a choice, one U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast.

Groups that try to cater to both hardliners and the West could find themselves without any friends, having distanced themselves from groups like Al Qaida but still viewed as extremists by the moderate opposition and their supporters.