Posted on 02/17/2015 6:22:30 AM PST by Timber Rattler
What is the Islamic State? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
This is the third posting I found of this article. It is good, but please use SEARCH before posting.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3258188/posts
Whatever.
My question is who funds them (not conjecture but actually)? Everytime I see a photo of truckloads of ISIS fighters, they always have nice fresh fatigues and sneakers, and look decently fed.
Except mods, of course.
Those of us who work for a living and are therefore only able to check in for a few minutes here and there appreciate multiple postings of the same stories.
I, for one, had not seen this story until now. Thanks for posting.
If ISIS is Al-Qaeda’s JV team, then that makes Obola the highest ranking benchwarmer on Team Civilization.
This ISIS be will continue until good people outside America take matters in their hands and end the threat around the world.
See my tagline.
Amen!
It’s not ISIS, it’s IS! They want to kill everyone who doesn’t believe their savage $hit.
Search nazis are so annoying. You spend time correctly posting an article (if you don’t dot i’s and cross t’s, correctness nazis will ding you). You search for it, but it has been posted 10 hours ago under a separate title.
The world could be going to hell in a hand-basket (often it is), and all they care about is protocol.
America and Europe also send boat loads of foreign aid bribes to various Moslem governments who give large amounts of it to the Jihadists. Most of the aid money to the arabs in greater Israel goes to the immediate project of killing the Jews in Israel but the pool of excess money among the various Moslem entities goes pretty much into the same pool. It is fungible. Any excess above subsistence goes to Jihad. I do not distinguish here between Shia and Sunni. They fight each other even as they share in the resource pool.
Well, ultimately, we are funding them at the pump because of leftist policy that prevents us from using our own resources instead of those from the Saudis.
Who funds them is the $50 question.
Remember it is our policy that we were arming and training and funding a force to overthrow Assad in Syria. To that end we were recruiting jihadists from Libya and all over the world for that matter.
That war was being led by a Turkish general; Turkey is the safe rear area for this war.
Some training was going on by our forces in Qatar and I think Qatari money pays for some of it.
The Saudis I believe are also involved.
We are acting like ISIS is somehow separate from the other jihadists in Syria but that is only because they have become a PR problem. When they rolled into Iraq they were well armed with US equipment. They quickly “captured” all the equipment we abandoned in Iraq when we prematurely pulled out, along with some of the oil fields so they are very well equipped and and funded as they sell oil around the world. The Kurds are having trouble selling their oil without Baghdad’s permission but ISIS doesn’t have that problem.
So, there you have it. Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and State Department. ISIS is doing what they were designed to do, overthrow Assad and drive a physical wedge between Iran and Syria. If it weren’t for the embarrassing head-chopping, Obama would be taking credit for his brilliant strategy. As it is, he has to pretend to spank them.
<<< What is the Islamic State? >>>
The JV.
ISIS wants to unify Sunni Islam under a Caliph, a form of religious-political governance that was satisfactory to Sunni Muslims from 632 AD until 1922 AD.
I think this is a good idea, mostly because it gives GPS coordinates for our Trident missiles.
Seriously - what Sunni Muslims do in their own lands is of no concern to me. I accept that their religious/social practices are barbaric. I hope that the healing power of Jesus Christ can somehow become known among their people.
A Sunni Muslim jihad against MY lands and MY people, OTOH, is of great concern. Several strategies have been proposed here and elsewhere to deal with this, but they are either a) undoable or b) unworkable.
I think a unified Sunni empire with a Caliph that has a name and an address, whose head is at risk for Sunni misbehavior outside of the Ummah, is a reasonable approach.
Of course, it goes without saying that states outside the Ummah would have to ban the practice of true Islam and would have to return, forcibly if necessary, practitioners of true Islam to an area under the rule of the Caliph.
Whether we could tolerate “Reform Muslims”, who would bear as much relation to true Islam as Reform Jews do to real Judaism is unclear to me.
The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
I usually read liberal articals on Islam for laughts... but Graeme Wood is right on the above... might be worth reading the entire piece...
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