On October 31, a Russian jetliner crashed in Egypt, killing 224 people. While we know at least one of the Paris terrorists posed as a Syrian refugee to sneak into Greece, Obama said it’s “shameful” for American lawmakers to deny Syrian Muslims entry into the US.
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The President of the United States also added that he would love to be the commissioner of a basketball team.
ISIS has become many different things to different people.
President Obama called on world leaders to accept refugees fleeing Syria, despite indications that terrorists exploited the refugee crisis to facilitate carrying out the Paris terror attacks. Terrorism analysts points to its organizational skills and reach in recent attacks. Oil experts stress the financial resources the group has accumulated from oil sales.
What Does ISIS Want? .
The president grew visibly irritated with repeated questions during his news conference about whether he should act more decisively or faster to destroy Islamic State. From Baghdadi’s perspective, though, this must appear a risk worth taking. All weekend, commentators had mocked his recent declaration that the Islamic State was “contained”. The United States has been playing along as it supports the PYD, which is not on Washington’s terror lists like the PKK is.
What’s Life Like In The Caliphate? Clearly the group has something to do with Islam, and its various names do start with the word “Islamic”.
Now, the most obvious problem with that idea, of course, is that any elected official who gives two spits about what the Islamic State wants or doesn’t want when making decisions concerning immigration or foreign policy – or any policy, for that matter – is being incomprehensibly irresponsible.
Is ISIS Getting Stronger Or Weaker? .
President Obama has no choice now.
And attacks outside its core area are not new for ISIS. Suspect Salah Abdeslam is believed to be on the lam. The attacks were the deadliest in France since World War II, and the deadliest in Europe since the 2004 Madrid train bombings, according to The NY Times.
A few see these actions as the work of a group that’s on the defensive and is feeling squeezed. Recruiting followers, after all, is how a group shows what it really stands for. Or the Islamic State could concentrate on subverting young men living in the United States; think of foiled NY subway suicide bomber Najibullah Zazi or the murderous Boston Marathon bombers. The country is advising militias that are fighting ISIS, but there’s concern that Iranian involvement could inflame sectarian tensions, particularly in Iraq.
Instead of sending members overseas to the United States and running the risk of getting caught, it seems that the most effective way for the Islamic State to carry out its deeds on American soil is to assemble citizens already here.
For decades now, we have seen incessant conflict in the most complicated sector of the world.
It’s extremely hard to tell whether this constitutes a genuine web of connections that can be controlled by ISIS central in Syria, or whether it’s just local radicals looking to raise their own profile in their home countries.
The challenge of ISIS has no simple answer. The sophistication and organization suggest the attacks were carefully orchestrated, but investigators are still putting the pieces together.
Wood said it was unlikely that Islamic State would emerge as victors if foreign powers launched a full assault on them in Syria and Iraq, so its supporters may have put in it a “strategically uncomfortable corner by carrying out an attack more gruesome and successful than its leaders wished”.
Special forces committed to the fight must be accompanied by better on-the-ground intelligence operations, combined with constant targeting and degradation of ISIS leadership, and a more robust disruption of the ISIS logistics chain, executed simultaneously in Iraq and Syria.
ISIS lacks friends, allies or sympathetic countries that can provide substantial assistance or weapons.
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He called Obama’s remarks in Turkey “embarrassing” and said it was the president’s “false pride” that has him backing “an obviously failed strategy” to defeat ISIS.
