it’s all scrambled out for me and i dont understand.
plz explain? (i beg your pardon; my ignorance)
electroFAYSEE-
Greetings and welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board. I hope you’ll enjoy your stay and find many things to discuss and learn here.
I hope you’ll take the time to read the rules of the SDMB in general and the Great Debates forum in particular. Unfortunately, your Original Post here is not quite up to our standards. I’ll leave it up for the moment to see if a debate develops, but in general, we expect our posters to make their debates clearer and to take a position as they begin a debate.
Again, welcome to the SDMB. I hope you enjoy your visit.
Jonathan Chance
Moderator
Great Debates
Following the Arab Spring of a couple of years back, a number of Syrians rose up to overthrow the murderous Assads running Syria.
The vast majority of Western nations initially stayed well out of the struggle.
Meanwhile, the utter brutality of the Assad regime began to chase many Syrians out of their homes and into Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey where they were placed in refugee camps that put a strain on the resources of the nations that sheltered them.
Over time, the brutality of the Assad’s regime, along for pleas for assistance from the neighboring states being overrun by refugees, began to encourage various Western states to supply the rebels with support.
There was not, initially, an organized movement among the Syrian rebels. Eventually, as they tried to organize, different factions arose: those who were politically and religiously moderate, seeking a new democratic government in Syria; those who were driven by extreme Islamist views who wished to set up an “Islamic” state.
After several years of tepid support for the moderate rebels from the West while Muslim Fundamentalists poured money and troops into the fight, the Islamists began attacking the moderates as well as the Syrian government.
Eventually, a guy calling himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became the leader of the Islamist organization and proclaimed a new Caliphate with himself as Caliph. (The original Caliphate was the empire that was created immediately after the death of Mohammed that is regarded by many as the high point of Muslim history–before it began to fracture into civil wars).
Iraq and Syria share a lot of social ties and political associations. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is Iraqi. So when the Islamists felt themselves strong enough, (and even before overthrowing Assad), they launched an invasion of Iraq from Syria.
They have taken the name Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. (al-Sham, in Arabic, is a name for Syria, but is also the word used that is translated into European languages as Levant, meaning the entire region. This has led to the “state” getting two abbreviations, ISIS and ISIL, where the L in the second abbreviation means Levant. ISIS is the more common usage.
The Iraqi government has a lot of problems with corruption, leading to underpaid (or unpaid) and poorly trained Iraqi troops abandoning their posts when ISIS invaded.
ISIS is a Sunni organization and when it first invaded Iraq, a lot of Sunnis in the Western part of the country (with ties to their Syrian neighbors), welcomed it because they are a minority in Iraq and have been routinely shortchanged by the Shi’a dominated Iraq government.
Recently, that has begun to change because the fanatics of ISIS have imposed an extremely harsh set of rules on them, although many of them still prefer ISIS.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a monster who has turned his group into a murderous mob of extremists who are actually opposed even by al Qaida.
ISIS has committed a number of atrocities in its war, murdering anyone, (men, women, and chlildren), whom it does not deem to be “correctly” Muslim enough.
It was during genocidal attacks on minority groups near the Syrian-Iraqi border that the U.S. first used airstrikes to hold them off so that the trapped groups could try to escape and so that the Iraqi army could try to regroup.
ISIS has also moved against the Kurdish people in the north of Iraq as not sufficiently Muslim. The Kurds had developed a sense of autonomy as early as the Saddam Hussein regime under the cover of the American/British no-fly zones that prevented Hussein’s air force from attacking them. In consequence, their militias are better prepared to meet ISIS in the field and the U.S. has been supplying them.
As ISIS has continued to be a threat to Iraq, (and, as no other Arab nation in the region wants to see themselves subjected to the new Caliphate), the U.S. has persuaded a number of Arab countries to use their air forces to attack ISIS in both Iraq and Syria.
In a side action, a group related to al Qaida, called Khorasan, has been hiding out in ISIS-controlled areas, (even though there is no love lost between them), and U.S. Intelligence has reported that they are plotting attacks on Europe and North America. So among the targets selected in the last few days of air strikes have been places where Khorasan is suspected of hiding and training.
The U.S. has declared that it will not put soldiers into Iraq or Syria to fight ISIS and it is trying to persuade other countries in the region to go into those countries to defeat ISIS.
And suppose the U.S. completely succeeds and wipes ISIS off the face of the earth?
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In Syria currently the government and rebel forces are roughly equally matched. If the third or so of the rebel forces represented by ISIS are lost this will give the government forces the upper hand and they will probably crush the revolution leaving Assad in charge.
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In Iraq currently the ruling Shiite government has been forced to make some tentative moves toward the Sunnis and Kurds because of the military loses to ISIS. If ISIS is defeated the Shiites will be able to return to the policy of totally marginalizing the Sunnis and Kurds.
One is likely to infer from the above that you do not believe the current policy being pursued is the best one. Would you care to share your idea of a policy that would be superior?
I think the US may have to live with the fact that Assad will remain in charge anyway. He’s too well entrenched and has the backing of Russia, he’s not going any place soon. The threat that ISIS represents is far more real than anything Assad represents.
And then in 10 years we can play “Oh no, extremists are the only dissent left in the about-to-fall dictatorship we supported because Russia” all over again!
AND we’ll have a whole new group of people armed by the USA and then abandoned when it no longer suited their interest really pissed off at the USA, then there will be a whole new failed rogue state for the USA to invade!
Why it is almost starting to seem like a make work program for the military industrial complex.
I am deeply disturbed by your lack of faith.
That was insufficiently welcoming to my eyes. Much more like a “go away because you are not good enough to post here.” I’m giving you a D- on this assignment and I hope you’ll take the time to look up what is expected in a good host.
Quoted in full to make a point. I usually associate walls of text with crackpots, not longterm posters and mods. Publishers have known for centuries that paragraphs need some indication that they are separate sections of prose. Usually they use tabs or blank lines as separators. As a mod you have the power to clean up that mess to help the poor OP understand a situation that is confusing enough.
I’m very disappointed with both of you boys. Do try to do better in the future. 
The United States’ approach to this war seems like a propaganda run. The citizens condemn the government for having a presence overseas and continuing the moderation of the middle east yet the government, media, and even the average joe on the street are celebrating these ‘victories’ as if we’re winning something and our past experiences don’t matter. I don’t know that I oppose our part in this, but something feels off about it.
For what purpose, though? There’s no oilfields to capture, like with Iraq & Kuwait. There aren’t any multi-billion dollar military contracts at stake, like with Vietnam. And the timing’s no good for getting embroiled in a doomed war so Obama’s successor can take all the blame, like G.H.W.B. did to Clinton with Somalia. Sure, there’s the obvious motivation of “looking tough” to the American people and others who’ve been upset by all those beheading videos, but other than that, what do you think’s the real agenda?
And am I the only one who thinks the name “Khorasan Group” sounds like a corporate foundations that funds PBS shows?
electroFAYSEE - Thank you SO much for making this thread! I haven’t been following the Syria crisis since the beginning, and I found myself hopelessly confused about what has been going on. Any explanation I found was too detailed or too simplified to really help me.
I would have posted something similar here, this being a really good place to get information tailored to one’s needs, but I was too embarrassed to admit to how clueless I was about this situation! That was stupid of me, right?
Welcome to the SDMB, and thank you again!!
Tomndebb - and thank YOU for your excellent summary! It was exactly what I needed.
dropzone - I’m going to assume you were being facetious when you criticized tomndebb for his paragraph spacing issues. If you’re having trouble reading it, copy and paste it into Word, do a find and replace with ^l in the top box and ^p^p in the bottom, and bob’s yer uncle.
**Jonathan Chance **- I’m really fucking embarrassed right about now. What kind of a way is that to talk to a new poster? His query was perfectly understandable. If you felt you needed to give him a couple of tips for future posts, you could have PM’d him or something instead of publically shaming him. You owe him and everybody else an apology.
I’ll just sit here and await my forthcoming warning(s).
Thank you to those who have posted informative replies in this thread. I hope ElectoFAYSEE pays more attention to those than Jonathan Chance’s rudeness.
For the record I think it far better to model the desired posting style than to attempt to shame someone into it – or more likely to drive them away.
To be honest, it was a very poor OP. Like a grown man asking his mother to hold his hand while he crosses the street.
And this was a modern masterpiece? 
(Just teasing you, my beany friend. That was a fun thread.)
The point is not the “quality” of the OP but that it would have cost Jonathan Chance nothing to have simply been polite.
Only sorta facetious. All of us give newbies shit for posting walls of text, and what’s good for the goose…
And I was NOT junior modding. I was junior adminning. 
Wow, that was seriously, seriously not cool. Not cool at all.
ENOUGH!
Take any objections to or comments upon Moderator actions to ATMB. This thread is not the appropriate place for them.
[ /Moderating ]
I wanted to show the OP that there were people here on his side. New folks don’t know to go to ATMB to find support.