It still amazes me how a force of an estimated 30,000, spread across a wide swath of Iraq and Syria, can blow through the Iraqi army like a hot knife through warm batter, while decimating the Syrians at the same time. Are they THAT much better as fighters?
WTF is going on out there?
It’s almost as if obama wants them to succeed...
You can be well funded, you can be well armed, but unless you are well disciplined, you are not an effective fighting force.
These guys run like rabbits.
I think their brutality precedes them. When you know you will be executed if captured it probably gives you pause. It is a very effective way to wage war. The Romans did the same thing.
There is more than 30,000 of them. And more than half of the Iraqi army are ISIS sympathizers who either lay down their guns and walk away, or join up with ISIS.
The Iraqi army are not fighters. There is no loyalty to the artifical boundries that is the state of Iraq. Hell, most of them are probably up with the ISIS cause so they are definitely not going to risk their neck fighting for something they don’t care about.
WTF is going on out there?
Muslim armies are usually put to rout by a determined opponent, even when that opponent is greatly outnumbered.
I strongly suspect that ISIS or at least ISIS sympathizers hold many positions in the Iraqi army.
ISIS’s ability to utilize the stolen American equipment leads me to this conclusion. These guys operating the stolen equipment probably got trained on it - by US advisors, when they were our ‘friends’ in the Iraqi army.
The one thing that perplexes me, though. We have air superiority. ISIS should not be able to operate an army in the wide open spaces between these Iraqi cities. Just a few bombing runs should do enormous damage to ISIS. Not destroying some empty building in Syria...but cluster bombs on the troops in the field, where they are sleeping. At very least, those long convoys of pickup trucks should be phenomenally easy to destroy...but we don’t.
They become individuals fighting an Army.
The ONLY thing that seems to motivate and Arab soldier is Jihad. Absent that they're just homosexual pedophiles playing soldier.
Read about the rapid advances of the Imperial Japanese Army in 1941-42.
Calling ISIS "terrorists" has completely blinded us to what is going on. Terror, as a tactic, is a solvent of enemy morale and esprit de corps. ISIS is using the tactic very successfully, as Japan did from Hong Kong to Singapore and Java, as the SS did in Ukraine, and as the Red Army did back to them from Bagration on to the East Prussia offensive and into Berlin.
We don't study history, and we SURE don't want to hear it, but aerial artillery (bombing) does nothing to an enemy like this except to show that we are cowards who won't face them sword to sword, who won't take their women and raise their children in OUR image instead of theirs.
An army that fights like this can achieve truly astounding gains in very short order, especially against weak, guilt-ridden Western forces.
I expect the two Abdullahs to be bound and then beheaded within months.
The only difference between ISIS now and Japan then is that Tojo didn't have Twitter.
What we need to do has been obvious since 8:46 am on 9/11/01. That we are not willing to do it took a little bit longer to sink in, at least for me.