China has just announced it too is joining the war against ISIS:
So we have a rare instance when the five permanent members of the UN security council agree unanimously on something. This article makes clear that ISIS is not like Al Qaeda and cannot become an underground movement, the Caliphate must openly hold territory.
One way or another they’re going to lose ground, to the Kurds, Assads’s forces with Russian help and whatever aerial + spec ops help the US provides. My prediction is that within 12 months ISIS will no longer hold any territory.
Then what? Go back to the old borders and hope for the best? We got the big 5 in agreement here so presumably the UN could redraw the relevant international boundaries as they see fit. Should they chuck out Sykes-Picot and start again? What else could be done to repeat yet another round of this mess five years later?
You really love that article, huh? It’s an interesting take, but it’s far from definitive and there have been a lot of alternative perspectives on it.
Just like Al Queda, ISIS will evolve, develop a new marketing pitch, and probably pick a new brand name to go with it. We’ll do what we’ve been doing and try to keep some kind of order in the power vaccuum, at enormous expense in both money and lives. Terrorists will keep doing their terrorist thing.
Eventually, something will change, in some way we can’t even begin to conceive of. And just like Communism rose and fell, so will this round of baddies, and some other baddies will take on the role. There’s just no telling.
Some other terrorist groups will certainly spring up, but I’m specifically asking in this thread what should be done with the territory that ISIS currently holds that could improve the situation long term?
Which is? The kurds? An unstable Iraq that can’t protect its own borders? The Assad government which the US has been trying to topple for the last three years? Is that really the best answer?
The governments of Iraq and Syria get their territory back. I dunno about the best answer, but considering you need a solution that Russia, the US, and China can all agree on, that’s probably as good as it’s going to get.
I’d be willing to bet money that’s not going to happen. The only question in my mind is whether the carving up of new international boundaries happens by Iran Russia and Saudia Arabia alone or if the west gets involved and tries to influence the outcome.
The organisation of ISIL must openly hold territory, so when it loses, it ceases to exist. The problem is the members of ISIL, who do not vanish in a puff of logic if ISIL collapses. ISIL is still a group of tens of thousands of horrible people who are violently in favour of slavery and genocide, so the more of them die while they’re out in the open, the less trouble they can cause later.
No, it’s not. It’s a bigoted one. At first you think they may have a point in calling ISIS Islamic. They are using it to mean that their beliefs are based on Islam. So you think they are just using the term in a different way. But throughout the peace they pepper it with the arguments that the Islamophobes use. They have an argument that ISIS’s view is the unperverted, unchanged meaning of what Islam is.
So, as such, nothing they say has any value, as they come to the situation from a bigoted perspective. We don’t know that anything that article says is accurate. We have no reason to trust it.
I suspect that, while ISIS right now needs territory, it won’t be defeated if it loses territory. It might dishearten those who thought they were going to cause the Aapocalypse, but the true believers will just think it wasn’t the right time, just like every other apocolyptic cult does. You just move it back.
It might be an opportunity to redivide things up along actual national and cultural lines, but that’s got nothing to do with what ISIS does or doesn’t do.
I just read the Atlantic’s article and I didn’t get that at all. It uses the pronouncements and broadcasts of ISIS to clarify what it is that drives them.
Certainly, from the horses mouth they seek to create a society that runs in line with a strict, literal interpretation of the earliest writings. They are, without doubt, following “Islam” as they see it.
Which quotes from the article do you think are problematic?
Well if that article was problematic heres another one by a journalist who read all the issues of ISIS official publication Dabiq (in English) and comes to a lot of the same conclusions. In Particular the Islamic State goes to a lot of trouble to justify their position based on early writings and they certainly have Islamic scholars amongst them. Yes its from Cracked but its a good read.
Quite, who’s going to manage it? A middle eastern country that will be subject to insurgency by ISIS in the same way as now? A coalition of western nations that will raise cries of “imperialism”
What’s silly? Short of actually achieving it, the Kurds have as much basis as any country ever has had. A full-fledged Kurdistan won’t solve all the region’s problems, but it will handle its own better than the pre-Daesh Syria and Iraq did.
The issue of Kurdistan really only has a vague relation to ISIL. Kurds are doing a respectable job of defending and taking back territory no matter whether the Kurish areas are in Syria, Iraq, or any other successor country.
What I take the OP is on about is a silly idea that since imperially-drawn maps are unjust, imperial countries should redraw the maps to carve out something new out of the vast spaces in eastern Syria and western Iraq. That’s silly, pointless, and totally lacking in self-awareness of the irony of the suggestion.
OK, I see. I agree that the drawing of the new borders should be done principally by those who will be living within and on each side of them, with at most facilitation from outside powers.
What I’m arguing against is the suggestions (such as Foggy and TheSeaOtter above) that outside powers force the re-constitution of the broken old imperial map. What the hell for?
The problem with defeating Da-esh is that it’s simply one manifestation of the Jihadist/Islamist movement in the MENA. Kill every current “member” of Da-esh, and a new group takes it place. The only way to get rid of it permanently is to get rid of the conditions that create it in the first place. How the hell you do that is beyond me. The only proven successful way to minimize it is to have rule by strongmen that create relative stability through authoritarianism.