Most recently, on Friday, the group carried out six coordinated attacks around Paris, killing 129 people and injuring hundreds more. “I think it’s unfair to refer to Islam, and it’s totally inappropriate to think of it as a state – so anything calling it the “Islamic State” is wrong”, he said.
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GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum said he would launch “a major American offensive against ISIS right now”.
In 2013, Islamic State expanded into the civil war in Syria. “Terrorism hit France not because of what it is doing in Iraq and Syria… but for what it is”, said Valls. This could require tens of thousands of ground troops, armor units and air forces to annihilate ISIS.
And yet, as the Paris attacks showed, the group is now acting on global ambitions.
“The pre-deployment training that everybody goes through prepares them for the the worst-case instances that you might imagine for chem [chemical], bio [biological], radiological events, he told Pentagon reporters”. President Barack Obama understands that if he were to proclaim a goal of definitively eradicating the Islamic State in the short term, he would fail and would have to eat his words.
Pursuing “limited” military means “tends to be the worst of the military options, because where it leads us is mission creep”. We’re now working with Syrian forces as well to squeeze ISIL, cut off their supply lines. The aspiration of the group is to convince the Muslim world that they are the Caliphate – the one true authority binding together all Muslims – which is something that all Muslims save for a very narrow lunatic fringe that no one considers representative of the faith as a whole reject.
Each person’s plan has differing degrees of intensity.
The group often refers to themselves as the Islamic State as this encapsulates their overall ambition, especially considering ISIS operates or has affiliates in other parts of the world, including North Africa and South Asia. We did limit al-Qaeda’s ability to operate in Afghanistan, but they moved elsewhere, and the anger we generated may have brought even more down on us. “We know that there could also be a risk of chemical or biological weapons”, he added, though he did not talk of a specific threat. In northern Iraq, Kurdish fighters ejected the Islamic State from the town of Sinjar in 48 hours. GOP hopeful Donald Trump has said we should “bomb the hell out of ISIS”. Other GOP candidates, like Sen.
The men who stormed the Bataclan concert hall and mowed down restaurant patrons in the streets of Paris were disciplined, trained soldiers, many of whom had seen action on the battlefield in Syria.
But despite polls showing strong support for ground troops within GOP circles – 64 percent in a new Bloomberg poll – it remains a politically dicey proposition that most top GOP candidates aren’t embracing.
Similarly, it is not entirely clear how many people are living under full or partial IS control across Syria and Iraq.
As its own oil trucks have been attacked by the US and allies, ISIS started to use civilian trucks to transfer its oil across the group-held territory and sell it to locals who use it for power generators and vehicles, according to local activists.
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So to a few degree, this comparison is apples and oranges: It’s highly likely neither candidate has devoted the time and resources to developing as detailed a strategy as Obama’s. Their proposals should be considered more of a general blueprint for what they’d do in the White House rather than what they’d actually do if they suddenly switched places with the president today.
