The strangely horrific nature and timing of the Jordanian pilot murder had me thinking about the internal nature of the IS and how that it may not be so homogenous as they want the world to think, mainly because of the curious flip flop on the pilots life and the potential prisoner change that would have likely occurred otherwise.
The thing that seemed to spook everybody about IS where perhaps other extremists didn’t was that they seemed to be much smarter and have more concrete plans. They rolled on banks, they rolled on military depots, they rolled on places they knew were weakly defended beforehand and they were coordinated about it. They wanted money, territory and governance - obviously at the end of a sword but those were things they thought about before shooting heads and blowing stuff up. And then the kidnappings started and I thought I was seeing a pattern whereby the IS leadership appeared a bunch smarter than earlier Islamic tyrants and a bunch more motivated about it all.
So here they were, becoming all Colombian kidnapping industry, including with the prisoner exchange of the Jordanian pilot and the Japanese captives and a whole bunch more … wanting millions, wanting released jihadis etc and so it seemed that the deal with Jordan was going to happen. The realistic monsters within IS were going to score some kind of PR victory, presumably what they wanted getting those jihadis released. And then bam - burning to death the only person that would seal the deal.
Looks to me that the Jordanian fellow was not specifically not beheaded like many other victims to send a message to folks within IS that there will not be any compromise with nearby governments like Jordan. I think this dissension could be worth looking at for people wanting to bring IS down. Encourage it to fight itself and so much the better for everybody else, right? Could be worth looking into, such as if there are any former IS leaders floating down a river somewhere…