He will be around as long as Russia and Iran consider him essential. As it stands right now the Syrian army will likely collapse immediately without Russian bombers and Hezbollah and Iranian troops on the ground. That may be forever, but he faces the same problems the Americans faced. Russian bombers can’t hold territory or bring the Sunnis to his side, and his counterproductive brutality against civilians makes it unlikely that any opposition group will negotiate with him.
I suppose it’s possible that Assad could rebuild the entire Syrian army from scratch like Stalin rebuilt the Red Army in 1941 but its’ unlikely.
The more territory they lose as an organisation, the more likely it is that individual “lone wolves” and small cells elsewhere will engage in more random acts of terrorism elsewhere, that don’t need a proto-state structure, can’t all be anticipated and stopped and can go on for years. As the IRA used to say “We only need to be lucky once, you need to be lucky always”.
Yes, but as far as the actual ‘nation-state’ is concerned, they’d lost.
By analogy, if the Allies overran all of Nazi Germany, but the Nazis resorted to insurgent tactics, then by reasonable overall definition the Nazis had already essentially lost the war. They could cause pain and suffering, but the Third Reich would be indisputably gone for good already.
I’m rather afraid that both these assessments are correct. ISIS, the political group that rules part of Syria and Iraq, will eventually be defeated, maybe this year, maybe much later. But when that happens, large numbers of fighters indoctrinated into their ideology will remain. Some of those may run off to join the Islamic extremist groups in other countries that have allied with ISIS. Others will go underground for awhile and then emerge, possibly under a different name.
While a military campaign to defeat ISIS and take their territory is the best option now, it won’t fundamentally solve the problem of extremist beliefs leading to terrorism.
In theory once ISIS does not hold any territory it should have a significant drop in recruitment and in reputation amongst extremists. They’ve declared a caliph and an Islamic State, if the caliph holds no territory then his claim to the caliphate is pretty much gone and likewise if they don’t lose in the way their end of days prophecy says (with the big battle at Raqqa etc) then again they suffer a propaganda loss. I’m sure they’ll try and spin it some way, but it should at lease undercut their current spiel that people can come and join their functioning state.
This is the headline I have woken up to this morning
**[SIZE=“6”][SIZE=“6”] Gun and truck attack leaves 84 dead in Nice: Men, women and kids strewn across road after lorry speeds for a MILE through holiday crowd…
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Yes we can defeat them in a land war but they will just melt away and continue their terrorist war. I hate to say this but is Trump right?
Remember that we are not talking about a race of people we are talking about a sect of a global religion (Islam) Not all Roman Catholics are Italian as not all Anglicans are English
Explain that to Trump. A politically useful Other needs to be readily identifiable by something that can’t be hidden or lied about, and preferably be in an identifiable Other place that can be attacked without getting the hands dirty other than Our Gallant Service People In Uniform, and not many of them either.
I thnk we have to concentrate our resources on destroying ISIL as a viable fighting force in Iraq and Syria and I’m pretty sure that’s doable and within the very near future. Of course that won’t defeat terrorism elsewhere but I’m sure it will have a dramatic effect on ISIL recruitment.
Yes, of course ISIS can stage the occasional attack here and there, but in terms of a *caliphate *- that is, a pseudo-country with territory and a government - ISIS is all but dead. By all reasonable standards that’s defeat.
Ah, yes. Mission Accomplished. When is Obama going to make the announcement?
Sorry, you’ve made 5 posts in your thread, including the OP and given a grand total of ZERO cites. You have an interesting opinion, but that’s all it is.
There’s still the possibility of Libya going their way even if it’s not included in the organization name. It became the next option to keep expanding influence when things stabilized in Iraq. It started to get a lot more focus from ISIS leadership in the last year as the Iraqi security forces got their act together.
Favorable to ISIS is that Libya still has competing governments claiming legitimacy. Less favorable is that Libya is being supported with US, UK, and French Special Forces on the ground in the last year.
Maybe a bit of we broke it, we bought it too. Most of NATO participated in creating the situation ISIS is trying to exploit. Ooops.
Italy chipped in a little support. They’ve allowed US drones to operate out of Sicily. The agreement was limited to defensive use in support of the SF forces on the ground not offensive strikes most think of when they hear drone strike.