After the terrorist attacks in Paris, there is now widespread paranoia against accepting more migrants from Syria after it was revealed some of the Paris perpetrators slipped into France posing as refugees. “This is not Islam”, Muslims and others rushed to defend a religion that has been butchered to fit a perverse ideology that should claim no religion.
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Governments responded in predictable patterns as well. “This is a wake-up call to make sure our defences are in order”. “I will not apologize for that, because we are fighting the long fight, and for us to do otherwise would be shortsighted”.
In short, one should have no illusions that simply intensifying airstrikes and more tough talk can lead to the defeat of ISIS. How do we name terror today? Among the many perils of American life from auto crashes to suicide, E. coli illnesses to floods, injuries from crumbling infrastructure to mass killings by non-Islamic lone wolves, Islamic terrorism remains at the bottom of the barrel in the company of other frightening but rare events like shark attacks. In Iraq the American government spent $2 trillion, lost nearly 4500 troops, and killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians.
– Reporting was contributed by Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad in Beirut; Richard A. Oppel Jr., Stephen Farrell and Nicholas Kulish in New York; Matthew Rosenberg, Mark Mazzetti, Matt Apuzzo and Eric Schmitt in Washington; and C.J. Chivers.
What is that something?
Obviously these actions, sensible though they may be, will not stop the carnage and mayhem in Syria and Iraq. All because of, you guessed it, “terrorism”.
The Turks are instead hitting the Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Pressure mounted on Prime Minister Nouri-al-Maliki to resign.
Take the United States, a place where, in the years since 9/11, the danger of being attacked by an Islamic terrorist could be slotted in somewhere between being “shot” by your dog and being shot by a toddler who has found a loaded, unlocked gun in your house, purse, or vehicle. Falluja was the first city to fall to IS militants at the beginning of past year. It was one of scores of Sunni groups fighting mostly in northern Iraq, and accounts differ about how effective or distinct it was. When the USA invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, a need emerged to replace the security vacuum with a new political elite. This week, we returned to the region visiting kirkuk. “And either they win, or we win”. Again, to over simplify, Daesh is a form of an acronym for the group’s full Arabic name. Because this attack in Mali seems to be a group affiliated with al-Qaida.
The support of the Western powers, and particularly the United States, for Israel was a battle cry for Osama bin Laden when he first organized al-Qaeda in the 1990s.
Iraqi officials complained of lack of cooperation from neighboring Syria. Though it will still take time for more precise details to emerge, nothing so far definitely shows that the Paris attacks differ significantly from prior failed plots involving sleeper cells operating in Europe – including returned foreign fighters in their ranks – with suspected links to low to mid-level ISIS operatives in Iraq and Syria.
What explains the success against al-Qaeda?
In September 2014, the U.S. began leading an global coalition in Syria to conduct air strikes on ISIS militants and other extremist groups there.
When the group captured Mosul in June previous year, the worldwide community was taken by surprise at the strength of a relatively unknown Iraqi group.
But the time to intervene in Syria was 2012, when there was no ISIS, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was not supported by Iran and Russian Federation, he said.
In 2013, Islamic State expanded into the civil war in Syria. The US greenlighted Turkish and Saudi aid to anti-Assad rebels, supplied these groups with material and financial assistance, and used the Central Intelligence Agency to train rebels at a secret base in Jordan. “In some cases I call it the driver of military operations for ISIS”, said Ahmed Ali, an Iraq analyst and senior fellow at the Institute of Regional and International Studies at the American University of Iraq.
But what vital interest of ours has ever been so engaged in Syria as to justify a major war in the Middle East and a military clash with a Russian Federation with a nuclear arsenal as large as our own?
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“His death is expected to temporarily degrade and disrupt the terrorist network and diminish ISIL’s (ISIS’) ability to potentially produce and use chemical weapons against innocent people”, the statement said. “So we had to figure out a way around that”. There they attacked foreigners, the most brazen of which were the assault on the Corinthian Hotel in Tripoli and the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians in February.
