A top Senate Democrat broke with President Obama on his assessment of the Islamic State’s strength, saying in the wake of the Paris attacks that the terror network certainly is not “contained“.
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Clearly our nation has ample military strength to crush the murderous terrorists in Iraq and Syria. The Pentagon says it doesn’t do body counts, but the attacks are believed to have killed upward of 20,000 IS fighters.
None of this bravado makes me feel safer here in Washington, where ISIS threatened more Paris-style bloodshed in a recent video. “It has been called a “proto-state” and a ‘quasi-state.’ Whatever the terminology, it’s much more than an insurgent group now – and it has millions of dollars at its disposal to fund its military adventures at home and overseas”.
Experts on Islam focus on the group’s Islamic postings. On one occasion, he even referred to a terrorist attack as an act of “workplace violence”. Oil experts stress the financial resources the group has accumulated from oil sales.
Clarke is chairman of the Middle East Institute and former White House counterterrorism czar in the Clinton and the second Bush administrations.
ISIS was born as a splinter faction of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
What’s Life Like In The Caliphate? . ISIS only has a state because Iraq’s and Syria’s governments lost control of their territory. And that is the follow-on step that can’t wait for an ISIS defeat on the battlefield.
However, is it accurate to say that ISIS is trying to destroy civilisation or democracy?
All that’s been lacking in the near-term battle against ISIS – both in Syria and Iraq – is capable ground combat components of a military effort that has been largely aerial in nature.
President Obama on Monday stressed solidarity with the French people after deadly attacks rocked that nation. “You don’t have to come'”. What were the key factors, in those intervening years, that allowed ISIS to grow so strong?
President Barack Obama says he sees encouraging progress.
And attacks outside its core area are not new for ISIS.
What are the ties between the situation in Syria and the attacks in Paris?
Over the last month, ISIS has claimed responsibility for a bomb that downed a Russian airliner in the Sinai desert, a vehicle bomb in a residential neighborhood of Beirut and other atrocities as well as the Paris attacks.
Peter Certo is the editor of Foreign Policy In Focus and the deputy editor of OtherWords, a non-profit editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. A few have translated the group as “the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria”, while others, including our government, translate the group’s name as “the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant”, indicating the terror movement’s ever more expansionist ambitions. Nothing would please ISIS more than using its on-line propaganda machine to disseminate an image of “Christian crusaders” vs. “Muslim martyrs” in order to attract supporters and revitalize its recruitment base. The group’s successes have given it broad appeal among radicals across the Muslim world and beyond, making ISIS even more unsafe.
Citizens anxious about a looming terrorist strike by ISIS are looking for reassurance that the Commander-in-Chief takes the threat seriously and that he intends to take aggressive action to prevent the unthinkable from happening. Three men blew themselves up outside Stade de France stadium during a France-Germany soccer match; three used the Polo to get to the Bataclan, where they all died in a standoff with police, they said. The sophistication and organization suggest the attacks were carefully orchestrated, but investigators are still putting the pieces together.
The strategic evolution of ISIS also resembles that of Al Qaeda, which grew from being grounded in a handful of conflicts to organising its global struggle through a series of franchises with only loose connections to Al Qaeda Central. So too, is taking and hold ground to shrink ISIS’ footprint. A year to the month after commencing airstrikes in Iraq, France began flying missions in Syria as well.
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ISIS lacks friends, allies or sympathetic countries that can provide substantial assistance or weapons. “I will not apologize for that, because we are fighting the long fight, and for us to do otherwise would be shortsighted”.
