Why ISIS Fights by Martin Chulov, The Guardian
… Now, close to 1,500 years later, have come waves of fighters who paid strict heed to these prophecies – and see the rise of Islamic State as a crucial turning point in a centuries-long battle of civilisations. For their purposes, the “Persians” today are not simply Iran, but also the Alawite regime that controls Syria and the Shia militias from around the region who have come to its defence.
The jihadis started to arrive in the summer of 2012, more than one year into Syria’s war, which had by then started to tip in favour of a ramshackle opposition that was locked into ousting Bashar al-Assad at all costs. Over the following six months, the foreigners came from all points of the globe, gradually asserting their will over opposition groups that were failing to press home their early gains on the battlefield and offered no convincing plan for the type of society that would eventually emerge from Syria’s ruins…
This is the story of why men from all over the world have chosen to fight in a brutal and apocalyptic war; of what drew them to the battlefields of Iraq and Syria; and of what has kept many of them there as Europe and the west have scrambled to stem the flow, first of their own nationals fleeing to join Isis and now of millions of refugees fleeing the other way…
Comments
The West needs a thorough non emotional/non political discussion about IS in the ME and do our own actions or lack of actions lend increasing creditability to IS and are we sustaining IS via our bombing of IS????
A new trend: families are sending their sons to join the Islamic State as only way to generate income
http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/in-syria-many-families-face-a… …
We urgently need to fully and completely understand why those that went to fight for IS then turn against IS and return-----there is a IS weaponization of information that we the US simply fail to understand nor even attempt to counter.
New report out today from @PeterRNeumann @ICSR_Centre on #IslamicState defectors (PDF) http://icsr.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ICSR-Report-Victims-Perpert… …
TD--what is even worse than Bremmer's decision was and is the simple fact that when we arrived in Baghdad we had absolutely no earthly idea that we were stepping into a phase two full blown guerrilla war --one the Salafists had been waging against Saddam since 1991 which then turned it's full attention to the US.
THEN instead of waging a counter guerrilla war we waged the so called COIN strategy that never could address the ongoing guerrilla war.
So yes did JSOC kill or capture foreign fighters and dented the then QJBR then AQI --yes but JSOC never addressed the fight as a counter guerrilla operation--they addressed it from a CT frame of mind.
As they killed or captured their way through to the third generation of leadership AQI. IS just got better at it.
Call it the Darwinian principle of guerrilla warfare--the best survive and adapt and get simply better at it.
AND let's definitely not admit that we parked/protected the current IS leadership safely from JSOC in Bucca and Abu Ghraib again because he had no earthly idea of the structures nor personalities behind AQI/IS.
Now we are facing a well tuned fighting machine and yet still do not know how to attack it.
Many of those now streaming into the ME are coming because of a very very effective weaponization of information being driven by IS--has anyone seen on the part of the US and or Europe a comprehensive counter information war--not a single attempt.
It is as if we have allowed IS to rule the social media world--how strange is that????
Very interesting reading. It would be beneficial to our politicians, to gain an understanding of the mindset of our adversaries, although I doubt any of them would bother. One could say, with his arbitrary edict that disbanded all of Saddam's military and police organisations, that J. Paul Bremer has a lot to answer for.