Conspiracy theories aside, and even if they are the active recipients of support and resources from Turkey, Saudi Arabia or any other country, how come the ISIL are still standing?
I understand that ISIL is now what al Qaeda has never been, in that it is both a nascent country that actually does control and administer large swathes of land in Syria and Iraq, as well as a classic terrorist ideology that recruits people to perpetrate terror acts around the globe. So in that it is both an evil country and a terrorist group. Forget about the terrorist group now, how come the 'country of ISIL; the state; hasn’t yet been defeated?
It’s been 15 months and up till a few weeks ago they were getting regularly bombed by a coalition of ten countries that now turned 13 (add France, Germany and UK). How many sites do they have? How much infrastructure? Have they gone underground; do they have the means and the time to build ammo depots and training facilities underground?
The area ISIL now occupies is a large, mostly-flat terrain in both Iraq and Syria, without mountains, valleys or sophisticated cave networks such as what you would find in Yemen or Afghanistan, so how does it make sense that this bombing isn’t yet fruitful?
Or is it though? Could it be that the activity of ISIL in its capacity as a terrorist group has magnified its actual impact as a country? Could its latest attacks in cities around the world be an indication of the fact it is fast losing ground where its roots are?
Absent a surrender (which I doubt ISIS is liable to give) you don’t generally defeat countries solely with conventional air campaigns, even old school total war ones where you wipe out whole cities or bomb power plants, electrical grids, water treatment plants, bridges, rail lines, etc. Which the coalition is not doing, since they want to avoid war crimes and massacring civilians.
There is no conspiracy, up until now the US strategy is to “funnel” ISIS / ISIL forces towards the Assad governments forces. The primary goal has been to remove Assad rather than defeat ISIS. Do some searches and there are numerous reputable articles on this.
Its only now changing with Russia’s involvement and Paris attacks changing the picture.
I am concerned it’s taking some time, but we’re not fighting an army with borders and is in one place. And I’m REALLY concerned how many more “soft targets” are going to be hit before or even after Assad is dead and most of ISIS is marginalized. At this point, I won’t be surprised if another hit happens years later, or if the rest of ISIS that scatters themselves and eventually joins with the new deadly regime that pops up.
That’s a good observation, because there is no number of security measures any country can take in order to protect its soft targets from attacks by lone wolves or people who are simply off detectable communication with known terror groups. Even if ISIL is defeated as an administration, it has already stirred up so much fundamentalism and insanity that you’re guaranteed to continue to witness gun attacks around the world years after.
ISIS is sustained by :
-oil sales. the oil is from ISIS controlled wells, shipped into Turkey (with full knowledge and approval of the Turkish government).
-weapons from the USA (stolen from the Iraqi army)
-volunteers from the west (like the killers in California)
defeating ISIS would involve getting the Turks to shut down the oil flow. that won’t happen.
I don’t think this is a realistic or sustainable model to keep a group like ISIL going for so long already in spite of the apparent bombing of their infrastructure. It’s not so much about the money, I think, but rather the logistics.
If there is no conspiracy, and it is the truth that the coalition powers with USA and Russia are really after ISIL, how hard is it to twist Turkey’s arm to suspend the inflow of foreign fighters and cash? To me, both the US and the EU seem to be on pretty good terms with Turkey. So are they in an endless loop of bombing an entity that is supported by a lifeline running through one of their major regional allies?
Right, the Turks will do squat. ISIS is useful to them. The West, however, can cut the flow of oil by blasting the wells and continuing to blast them, which does seem to be happening.
Boots on the ground. No amount of bombing will finalize a victory, it takes troops to kill/capture the last of the enemy government. It would take something close to the massacre or internment of the entire population of the territory to truly end resistance, and even then there would be guerrilla factions in the surrounding region. So far either no one wants or no one can commit to the level of conquest that would take.
We haven’t really been pushing. I agree that all it would take is one push to knock them down, but no one is really trying. I made a post in the past somewhat in jest about how old school armies could probably take out ISIS without any difficulty. I think that a division of WWII era troops would easily defeat ISIS. A division of WWI era troops would probably only have a minimal challenge. Even a division of troops from the 19th century, US Civil War or Napoleonic Wars, could probably take them out. The problem is nobody is willing to do so for political reasons. Note that I primarily lay the blame on the governments of the two countries that “host” ISIS territory. If Assad and the Iraqi government really wanted to get rid of ISIS, they could probably shut them down before the end of the year. They just don’t want to do it because of lack of political will. They wouldn’t even need to use their own jackbooted thugs (in the case of Syria) or incompetents (in the case of Iraq). They could just wake up tomorrow and ask for official support from Western armed forces on the ground and that would be the end of it.
While I agree with the boots on the ground bit, I disagree that genocidal actions needs to be committed. There is a hardcore group which must be eliminated, but the hanger on and causal members can be let go and watched.
Problems is you need a two part for the boots on the ground, the initial assualt and the later occupation. Which might need to last for years.
The current actions are the IR version of name calling and dick waving.
We haven’t really been trying defeat Da-esh. We’ve been trying to contain them, maybe push them out of Iraq, but we’re not going to bomb them to death unless we’re willing to take out thousands of civilians, too. At some point, some country or coalition of countries is going to have to send ground troops in to finish them off.
But let’s keep in mind that Da-esh is just the latest incarnation of the symptom, and if they are eliminated without affecting political change in the area, the most likely outcome will be some other group like it rising from the ashes in the same way Da-esh rose from the ashes of al Qaeda in Iraq. You’ve got a large population of Sunni Arabs living in areas controlled by Shi’a Arabs, and they don’t feel like they are part of the political process-- mainly because they actually have been excluded from the political process.
It’s more complicated in Syria with it’s greater ethno-religious fault lines, but it’s still a breakdown of the political process that allows groups like Da-esh to take hold in those areas. We see them now trying expand in Libya, and we can only hope that the more homogeneous population there isn’t as susceptible to being exploited along the lines we’ve seen in Syria and Iraq.
ISIS defines itself as a state at present. States survive with control of territory. ISIS continues to control territory because there is no force in the Middle East with both the willpower and the means to take their territory away.
The United States or even Turkey could take all of ISIS’s land in a few weeks, but both lack the willpower to get involved to that level. A lesson that was learned in WWII and been repeated many times since the development of air power is that while air power can gravely harm an enemy, and make it impossible to effectively defend against coordinated ground forces, air power cannot take and hold territory. The campaign against ISIS by the West is largely limited to air power and a few special operations missions that have occurred.
Note that if a power or combination of powers ever emerges that can take all of ISIS’s land away, that would spell the end to any real claim they are a “state” and would be a type of defeat. But they could, and likely would, continue to function as they did before, when they were “al-Qaeda in Iraq”, i.e. as a terrorist group that hides among the civilian population and strikes periodically as it suits them. An organization like that is more difficult to “defeat”, it’s similar to trying to “defeat” something like the Mafia or the Yakuza.
If Assad goes down another vacuum will occur in the region and ISSIL or other similar groups will fill it. It’s not like they invented the idea of a caliphate.