CIA Funds ISIS

[muir]

So Jungians would speak about these beings being from the unconscious mind or collective unconscious

All the big religions were 'REVEALED' to people from a higher power from the spirit world...christianity, islam, judaism ....dreams, visions, angels, talking burning bushes etc

magicians talk about the astral plane (where you are when you dream)

Shamans talk about the spirit world

Christans talk about angels and demons

Muslims talk about djinn

Gnostics talk about archons

UFOlogists talk about inter-dimensional entities

ok? All talking about the same stuff

Now whether you think they are just a part of our psyche or something from another world or dimension is upto you but all cultures know them

If you look back through history what do you see?

Tha aztecs were sacrificing people to them on top of pyramids

The nazis burned people in a holocaust. 'Holocaust' is a greek word to mean a burnt offering to the gods

The nazi SS were a chivalric knightly order whose symbol was the skull and bones known as the 'deaths head' because they were a death cult

Their HQ was in a castle called wewelsberg and in it was their inner sanctum where a coven or round table of knights of the 13 top officers met around a mural of the black sun which is saturn the god of time who eats its own young:

The knights templar from which nazism grew had as its symbol two knights on the same horse. Some misinfo people will tell you that this is because they were known as the 'poor knights of christ' but that is nonsense because not only were they incredibly wealthy but each knight had a horse and often 2 horses

The second knight is not a knight at all...it is a djinn that has synched with the knight (possession) who opened himself upto the djinn through ritual magick and drugs

How do the catholic exorcists exorcise demons? They surround the person with their family and friends and they pray to raise the vibration of the afflicted person to make their frequency go out of synch with the demon so that it cannot synch anymore with the person

We are energy vibrating.....love and hate are different frequencies. A magicians intent determines their frequency....do you come from love or hate?

How do shamens cure people of afflictions? They chant and play music around the afflicted person to change their frequency....resonance...its all wave form energy (in the beginning was the word)

Why was the catholic church murdering thousands of opponents? Why is the catholic church covering up ritualistic child abuse?

There are forces at work in this world that most people have been conditioned to think are fable....but they drive our world

The atrocities being carried out by ISIS at the moment are straight from the CIA training manuals they made for the death squads they sponsored in south and central america which encouraged the use of terror because the beings feed on those frequencies

The higher ups in the CIA are recruited from societies such as the skull and bones society and the knights of malta

 

[just me]

 

[muir]

Not sure what your point is there Just me can you please explain?

 

[just me]

I'd be glad to. I was expecting a sentence or two, a paragraph or two, or maybe a picture or two. The replication of all your hatred for CIA and the likes of them does not warrant the time for reading. We are not Satan, and the world is not destroyed because of us. You act sometimes like everyone else is innocent of wrongdoing. Bad times call for tough decisions, and those decisions will most always affect the future. I sometimes wonder if you realize the hatred you seem to harbor.

 

[just me]

What that man in the picture above is doing will further divide the Islamic world than most things any American has ever done.

 

[muir]

I'd be glad to. I was expecting a sentence or two, a paragraph or two, or maybe a picture or two. The replication of all your hatred for CIA and the likes of them does not warrant the time for reading. We are not Satan, and the world is not destroyed because of us. You act sometimes like everyone else is innocent of wrongdoing. Bad times call for tough decisions, and those decisions will most always affect the future. I sometimes wonder if you realize the hatred you seem to harbor.

So you didn't read any of it?

Well there's not much one can do in the face of such blind refusal

The psychopaths are not constrained to the CIA however and niether are the forces behind them...there are psychopaths at the top of all the pyramidal hierarchies including the muslim ones because that is what psychopaths do=gravitate towards power and pyramidal structures give them something to climb to attain more power and due to their ability to lie remorslessly they often climb very fast

 

[muir]

What that man in the picture above is doing will further divide the Islamic world than most things any American has ever done.

I don't blame americans....if you actually read my posts you would know that i trace most of the power of the network back to europe

The network is simply using the US military as a tool to achieve its ends

It doesn't care about any of the soldiers themselves and simply discards them when it is done with them. kissinger even described soldiers as dumb pawns to be used by powerful men

I don't blame americans i just hope that enough of them can wake upto the fact that the cabal is setting out to destroy their country as part of their road map towards a one world totalitarian fascist government that they will control

 

[muir]

[video=youtube;mnM66YKHYec]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnM66YKHYec[/video]

 

[Lark]

Do we know that ISIS isnt funding the CIA by now?

Just saying.

 

[muir]

Wow this 'conspiracy theory' lark is getting easy these days seeing as even the mainstream media is proving what we're saying...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...dy-is-falling-into-hands-of-isis-9610491.html

Syria conflict: Western countries sending millions of pounds in aid to Isis-controlled regions

Food aid and medicines sent by governments, NGOs and the UN are arriving in towns such as Raqqa, Manbij and Jarablus, which have witnessed beheadings and crucifixions since the terrorist group took over early this year



Isabel Hunter

Gaziantep, on the Turkish border

Wednesday 16 July 2014



Western governments are sending millions of pounds of aid to areas held by the radical Islamic group Isis in northern Syria, The Independent can reveal.

The aid, which is paid for by the UK, European and US governments, consists of food, medicine and hygiene kits. It is brought into the country through the war-torn north from the two last remaining border posts open with Turkey in Reyhanli and Kilis.
Western groups such as Mercy Corps International, the Norwegian Refugee Council, World Vision, the International Rescue Committee and the United Nations World Food Programme provide supplies to hundreds of thousands of people every month across the self-proclaimed Islamic State.
This includes towns such as Raqqa, Manbij and Jarablus, which have witnessed beheadings, crucifixions and other draconian interpretations of sharia since Isis took over early this year.


“We have lots of direct shipments into Isis-held areas. Nearly all of our trucks go through the Turkish border post near Kilis. Sometimes they get stuck en route, and we have to wait two or three weeks for them to get there if they get held up by fighting or another opposition group which isn’t happy that we’re sending aid through an Isis checkpoint,” said a Western aid worker. Aid groups say their aim is to help vulnerable people, not to support the rule of Isis. Mercy Corps, which has headquarters in the UK and the US, has received £27.3m from the UK Department for International Development for humanitarian activities in Syria.
A spokeswoman for Mercy Corps said: “We have been delivering essential aid to hundreds of thousands of civilians in need on all sides of the conflict, irrespective of race, ethnicity, religion or political affiliation — as an independent, impartial humanitarian organisation, that is our mandate.”
Isis uses social media to demonstrate the brutality with which it treats its enemies and those who break its laws. But it uses the same media to show it distributing aid and administering healthcare to people under its rule.


Its ability to deliver free aid and free fuel has been a major factor in persuading residents of recently conquered towns such as Mosul to accept its rule.
A spokesman for Dfid said it did not supply aid to Isis directly: “We supply life-saving aid to people who need it, in line with international humanitarian principles including impartiality.”
Bashar al-Assad, who was sworn in for a third term today, said states that have supported terrorism will pay the price and that he would fight insurgents until security was restored to the country.
“Soon we will see that the Arab, regional and Western states that supported terrorism will pay a high price,” he told his supporters at the presidential palace.

Local civilians queue for aid administered by Isis. Since it declared a caliphate the group has increasingly been delivering services such as healthcare, and distributing aid and free fuel
Meanwhile in warehouses and industrial parks along Turkey’s southern border, there are shipping containers waiting to be unloaded. Workers unload unmarked boxes which are then loaded on to commercial trucks. The food includes wheat, rice, tinned tomatoes, sugar and oil. The medical supplies are basic items that do not require cold storage such as bandages and basic drugs.
The trucks are then driven across the border to areas precariously held by Syrian opposition forces and Islamist groups including Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qa’ida’s official branch in Syria, which is also fighting against Isis.
Isis, reinforced by US military supplies taken from defeated Iraqi forces, has renewed its assaults against Syrian non-government forces including Kurds and Western-backed groups such as the Free Syrian Army.
Although Isis is officially fighting Jabhat al-Nusra, the Islamic Front and the Free Syrian Army, humanitarian aid and commercial goods are more often than not allowed to cross the “border” to Isis areas.
The aid is then distributed and monitored by civilian Syrian relief committees, many of which were in place before Isis took over, according to aid workers who operate out of Turkey’s southern city of Gaziantep.

Aid workers say Isis, which has kidnapped Western journalists and workers in the past, lets them work mostly without interference. “They’re happy to let us work on the large part without preconditions,” said one Western aid worker.
Isis is designated a terrorist group by the United State which also offers a reward of $10m (£5.8m) for information leading to the capture of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who declared himself caliph in imitation of the companions of Mohamed who set up a caliphate in the Middle East and North Africa in the seventh century.
In addition to international aid, Isis-controlled areas of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour are very fertile and produce a vast amount of the region’s wheat. Deir Ezzour also has some of the biggest oilfields in Syria.

Fighters from ISIS marching in Raqqa, Syria
Isis is also luring doctors and nurses with large salaries in return for their loyalty, a Syrian doctor working for a Norwegian medical NGO in Raqqa told The Independent.
“They are buying people one by one — they are offering doctors up to 100,000 Syrian pounds a month (£390), which is a fortune there now.
“At the beginning they would take any aid they didn’t have to pay for, but since they announced the establishment of the caliphate, they ar running their own services so that it can become more like a state.”

 

[Lark]

I think a lot of these crisis are accidents, unaccounted for variables, Lord of War was a great show for demonstrating exactly how this works out, the abandoned weapons in post-conflict societies just there for the taking at dimes and cents by traffickers and arms dealers was something I'd heard about before from people I know interested in gun running in relation to paramilitaries in NI and Europe.

There's a chance that ISIS coincides with US objectives, they want a Sunni power to sweep the middle east in order to challenge Iran who they blame for 9/11, its not surprising that the world powers try to exploit developments how they can, that's a different thing to being behind it all or controlling it all like some puppet master.

You know who I think could be a winner in all this crisis? The Brits, I think there's been a lot of positioning going, the Brits and European Powers, particularly the French, havent made their peace with the end of their empires and havent forgotten the Suez crisis. Russia is a pain in the arse for them though and Putin's delusions of grandeur.

 

[Stu]

Myth #1: ISIS is crazy and irrational

If you want to understand the Islamic State, better known as ISIS, the first thing you have to know about them is that they are not crazy. Murderous adherents to a violent medieval ideology, sure. But not insane.
Look at the history of ISIS's rise in Iraq and Syria. From the mid-2000s throught today, ISIS and its predecessor group, al-Qaeda in Iraq, have had one clear goal: to establish a caliphate governed by an extremist interpretation of Islamic law. ISIS developed strategies for accomplishing that goal – for instance, exploiting popular discontent among non-extremist Sunni Iraqis with their Shia-dominated government. Its tactics have evolved over the course of time in response to military defeats (as in 2008 in Iraq) and new opportunities (the Syrian civil war). As Yale political scientist Stathis Kalyvas explains, in pure strategic terms, ISIS is acting similarly to revolutionary militant groups around the world – not in an especially crazy or uniquely "Islamist" way.

ISIS controlled territory in June. BBC
The point is that, while individual members of ISIS show every indication of espousing a crazed ideology and committing psychopathically violent acts, in the aggregate ISIS acts as a rational strategic enterprise. Their violence is, in broad terms, not random – it is targeted to weaken their enemies and strengthen ISIS' hold on territory, in part by terrorizing the people it wishes to rule over.
Understanding that ISIS is at least on some level rational is necessary to make any sense of the group's behavior. If all ISIS wanted to was kill infidels, why would they ally themselves with ex-Saddam Sunni secularist militias? If ISIS were totally crazy, how could they build a self-sustaining revenue stream from oil and organized crime rackets? If ISIS only cared about forcing people to obey Islamic law, why would they have sponsored children's festivals and medical clinics in the Syrian territory they control? (To be clear, it is not out of their love for children, whom they are also happy to murder, but a calculated desire to establish control.)
This isn't to minimize ISIS' barbarity. They've launched genocidal campaigns against Iraq's Yazidis and Christians. They've slaughtered thousands of innocents, Shia and Sunni alike. But they pursue these horrible ends deliberately and strategically. And that's what really makes them scary.

http://www.vox.com/cards/isis-myths-iraq/crazy-irrational

 

[Stu]

Myth #2: People support ISIS because they like its radical form of Islam

You have probably heard that ISIS has a degree of popular support among some Iraqi and Syrian Sunni Muslims. That's true: without it, the group would collapse. People sometimes assume that this says something about Islam itself: that the religion is intrinsically violent, or that Sunnis would support the group because they accept ISIS's radical interpretation of the Koran.
That's all wrong, and misses one of the most crucial points about ISIS: the foundation of its power comes from politics, not religion.
Let's be clear: virtually all Muslims reject ISIS' view of their faith. Poll after poll shows that violent Islamist extremism and especially al-Qaeda are deeply unpopular in Muslim-majority countries. The bulk of ISIS' victims are Muslims – many of them Sunnis (ISIS is itself Sunni). A popular revolt among Iraqi Sunnis, beginning around 2006, played a huge role in defeating ISIS's predecessor group, al-Qaeda in Iraq. That revolt was inspired, at least in part, by anger at ISIS's attempt to impose its vision of Islam on Muslims who disagree.
Iraqis displaced by ISIS collect Red Cross aid. Haidar Hamdani/AFP/Getty Images
ISIS's vision of Muslim life is pretty alien to actual Islamic tradition. Fundamentalist Islam – like most religious fundamentalisms – is a modern phenomenon. Fundamentalist groups, frustrated with modern politics, harken back to an idealized Islamic past that never actually existed. The al-Qaeda strain of violent radicalism owes more to 20th century writers like Egyptian Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb than the actual post-Muhammed caliphate.
So if Sunnis disagree with ISIS' theology and don't like living under its rule, why do some of them seem to support ISIS? It's all about politics. Both Syria and Iraq have Shia governments. Sunni Muslims aren't well-represented in either system, and are often actively repressed. Legitimate dissent is often met with violence: Bashar al-Assad gunned down protesters in the streets during the 2011 Arab Spring demonstrations, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki reacted violently a 2013 Sunni protest movement as well.
So Sunnis understandably feel oppressed and out of options. Some, then, seem to be willing to wait and see if life under their fellow Sunnis in ISIS is any worse than it was before. ISIS, for its part, appears to be attempting to exploit this concern: that's why it's set up community, child-care, and medical services in some of the Sunni communities it controls.
That doesn't mean ISIS is morally better than Assad or Maliki: they group is still hyper-violent and genocidal. It's just that outreach to Sunnis is part of their politico-military strategy.

http://www.vox.com/cards/isis-myths-iraq/isis-islam

 

[Stu]

Myth #3: ISIS is part of al-Qaeda

The key thing to understand about ISIS and al-Qaeda is that they are competitors, not allies, and certainly not part of the same larger group.
ISIS used to be al-Qaeda in Iraq. But the group split apart from al-Qaeda in February 2014 because it wouldn't listen to al-Qaeda HQ's commands, including orders to curtail its violence against civilians. (That's right: it was too violent for al-Qaeda.) This ISIS-AQ divorce is a key reason why ISIS is so unremittingly violent, yet many people still lump the two groups together.
For years, al-Qaeda was the clear leader of the global jihadist movement. The loose network of militant groups, internet forums, and "lone wolf" individuals saw al-Qaeda as the gold standard – and many pledged allegiance to it or established some kind of junior-partner working relationship.

Unidentified Iraqi militants. STR/AFP/Getty Images

When ISIS broke off, it upended everything. By taking a chunk of territory the size of Belgium in the heart of the Arab world, ISIS had come much closer to the end-goal of an Islamic caliphate than al-Qaeda ever did. All of a sudden, it didn't seem so clear that Islamist groups around the world should pledge themselves to al-Qaeda. ISIS fought openly with Jabhat al-Nusra, which is al-Qaeda's Syria branch – and outperformed it on the battlefield. Today, ISIS controls far more territory in Syria than Jabhat.
This ideological competition drives ISIS to be more violent. "They're in competition with al-Qaeda, and they want to be the leader," JM Berger, the editor of Intelwire and an expert on violent extremism, said. According to Berger, one way they do that is by broadcasting images of their military prowess worldwide. In the sick, screwed up world of Islamic extremism, images of massacres are a show of strength.
When ISIS executed American journalist James Foley and put the video on YouTube, or when it declared its intention to wipe out Iraq's Christians and Yazidis, it's not doing it just because they can, although among individual militants indulging a sick desire is certainly part of it. At a broader level, this part of ISIS's plan to beat al-Qaeda and spread the ISIS brand globally.
The worst part: There's some evidence this plan is working. Even before ISIS's rapid advance in June, ISIS was wresting groups in Tunisia and Libya away from al-Qaeda's allegiance to their own. There have been ISIS-linked suicide bombings as far afield as Malyasia.

http://www.vox.com/cards/isis-myths-iraq/al-qaeda-isis

 

[Stu]

Myth #4: ISIS is a Syrian rebel group

It is true that ISIS opposes Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria, and the two constantly fight one another in Syria. But calling ISIS a "Syrian rebel group" misses two critical facts about ISIS. First, it's a transnational organization, not rooted in any one country, with lots of fighters who come from outside the country and are motivated by global jihadist aims as well as the Syrian war specifically. Second, Assad and ISIS are not-so-secretly helping each other out in some crucial ways, even as they fight. ISIS and Assad are frenemies, not full-on opponents.
For one thing, ISIS predated the Syrian civil war. It started as al-Qaeda in Iraq in the mid-2000s and, after that group was defeated by Iraqis and American forces around 2008, reformed in the same country. Between 2008 and 2011, ISIS rebuilt itself out of former prisoners and ex-Saddam era Iraqi army officers. ISIS did not grow out of the Syrian rebellion: it took advantage of it.
Now, it's true the war in Syria benefitted ISIS tremendously. It allowed ISIS to get battlefield experience, attracted a ton of financial support from Gulf states and private donors looking to oust Assad, and a crucial safe haven in eastern Syria. ISIS also absorbed a lot of recruits from Syrian rebel groups – illustrating, incidentally, why arming the "good" Syrian rebels probably wouldn't have destroyed ISIS.

In a weird way, this has all benefitted Assad. The Syrian dictator has vigorously pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy during the war. He's tried hard to push the sectarian angle of the civil war, making it into a life-or-death struggle for his Alawite (Shia) and Christian supporters against the Sunni majority. ISIS' extremism has helped convince Alawites that defecting the rebels means the destruction of their homes and communities.
And Assad has also used ISIS to divide his other opponents: the moderate Free Syrian Army, other Islamist groups, and the United States. One way he's done that is by focusing Syria's military efforts on the moderate Syrian rebels, leaving ISIS relatively unscathed. By allowing ISIS and other Islamist groups to become stronger at the expensive of other rebels, Assad made it much harder for the US to intervene against him without benefitting the rebels. And ISIS and moderate rebels have begun fighting against one another, further dividing the war in a way that's beneficial to Assad.
In essence, Assad and ISIS seem to have made an implicit deal: ISIS temporarily gets a relatively free ride in some chunks of Syria, while Assad gets to weaken his other opponents. The two sides still hate each other, but both benefit from the status quo.

http://www.vox.com/cards/isis-myths-iraq/isis-syrian-rebels

 

[Stu]

Myth #5: ISIS is only strong because of Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki

There's a theory that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is solely, or mainly, responsible for ISIS's resurgence in 2014. It's true that Maliki's policies enabled ISIS's rise. But blaming him alone misses the real drivers of sectarianism in Iraq – and the complicated, multi-faceted sources of support ISIS enjoys.
Maliki did a number of things that unintentionally enabled ISIS' rise. He used Iraq's counterterrorism laws to imprison Sunni dissenters. He exploited laws that prohibit Saddam-era officials from holding office (a number of those officials had been Sunni) to boot Sunnis out of the upper echelons of the government and military. He arrested peaceful Sunni protestors, and aligned himself with non-governmental Shia militias that had slaughtered Sunnis during the post-invasion civil war. And that's only a partial list of Maliki policies that turned Sunnis against the Iraqi central government, and thus toward ISIS.
But it is simply incorrect to assign most of the blame for ISIS's rise to Maliki. For one thing, Sunni anger at Iraq's government, a quasi-democracy that empowers the Shia majority, runs much deeper than this one man. "Even if Maliki weren't in power, there are some Sunni grievances that any Shia government would have problems with," Kirk Sowell, a risk consultant and full-time Iraq watcher, says.


To take one example, many Sunnis wrongly believe that they're the largest demographic group in Iraq. This belief, spread during Saddam's time to justify Sunni minority rule, leads Sunnis to see any government they don't head up as fundamentally unjust. Neither Maliki nor his also-Shia successor, current Prime Minister-delegate Haider al-Abadi, can fix that.
More to the point, ISIS isn't just an Iraqi problem. Its base in Syria today is just as, if not more, important than the land it controls in Iraq. They've gotten funding from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait, and wink-wink-nudge-nudge help from Syria's Bashar al-Assad.
The really important takeaway here is that Maliki's political defeat does not mean ISIS will wither away, nor that Baghdad political reforms could solve this problem alone. The Abadi government will need to undertake deep, structural reforms if it wants to address Sunni grievances. The Sunni community will have to reject ISIS and come to terms with the Shia majority. And even if all of that happens, ISIS will still have its base in Syria.

http://www.vox.com/cards/isis-myths-iraq/maliki-isis

 

[Stu]

Myth #6: ISIS is afraid of female soldiers

A bizarre meme going around claims that ISIS is really afraid of fighting all-female Kurdish military units. The theory is that ISIS fighters believe that if a woman kills you, you don't get to go to paradise.
The truth is that ISIS' approach to women is much more complicated – and troubling – than Western stereotypes about Islamists would suggest. ISIS has its own female brigades, and the group uses them to enforce its deeply misogynistic ideology.
The "ISIS is afraid of female fighters" theory comes from a stray quote in a Wall Street Journal piece about Kurdish advances against ISIS. It quotes a female Kurdish soldier as saying "the jihadists don't like fighting women, because if they're killed by a female, they think they won't go to heaven." Note that it's not an ISIS fighter, a scholar, or necessarily someone who's interrogated an ISIS fighter: just a random Kurdish soldier, who may not be super-familiar with ISIS's ideology.
What we actually know about ISIS's approach to women, however, paints a rather different picture. ISIS has all-female battalions, called "al-Khansaa" and "Umm al-Rayan," that operate in Syria. ISIS female fighters wear full burqas and carry rifles; they exist to force other women to comply with ISIS's vision of sharia law. "ISIS created [them] to terrorize women," Abu al-Hamza, a local, media activist, said in an interview with Syria Deeply.
ISIS's use of women is part of a rising trend of jihadist women claiming roles in violent Islamic extremist groups. "There is a process of female emancipation taking place in the jihadi movement, albeit a very limited (and morbid) one," Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on violent Islamism at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, told The Atlantic. "Many of them are eager to portray themselves as strong women and often make fun of the Western stereotype of ‘the oppressed Muslim woman.'"
ISIS is dedicated to oppressing women, and uses rape as a weapon to terrify the population into submission in territory it controls. Somehow, perversely, it has managed to enlist large numbers of women to help in that awful effort.

http://www.vox.com/cards/isis-myths-iraq/isis-female-soldiers

 

[Stu]

Myth #7: The US can destroy ISIS

You've probably heard it a million times: if only the United States stepped up its bombing campaign in Iraq, launched a combing campaign in Syria, or did more to help moderate Syrian rebels, it could destroy ISIS. The fact that it hasn't, in this telling, is a damning indictment of President Obama's feckless foreign policy.
The truth is even more disappointing: There is no magic American bullet that could fix the ISIS problem. Even an intensive, decades-long American ground effort – something that is politically not on the table, anyways – might only make the problem worse. The reason is that ISIS's presence in Iraq and Syria is fundamentally a political problem, not a military one.
American aircraft are very good at hitting ISIS targets out in the open: on roads or in the desert, for example. That's why US air support was extremely effective in clearing a path for Kurdish and Iraqi forces to retake the Mosul dam in mid-August.
But American airpower is much less useful in dense urban combat, where it's also likely to cause unacceptable amounts of civilian casualties. In response to a stepped-up American bombing campaign, ISIS could hunker down in fortified city positions. That would force the Iraqi army and Kurdish forces to engage in bloody street-to-street combat. Historically, the Iraqi army has a bad track record in those fights. It spent a good chunk of early 2014 trying to dislodge ISIS from Fallujah, a city near Baghdad. It failed to permanently push them out, and killed a lot of Sunni civilians in the process.
What if the US also stepped up its campaign in Syria, arming the Syrian rebels and bombing ISIS positions? A pretty comprehensive review of research on arming rebels, by George Washington University's Marc Lynch, suggests that wouldn't have helpedeven back at the beginning of the civil war. The "moderate" Syrian rebels are too diffuse, and fighters shift in and out of alliances with ISIS and other radical Islamists.


If the US wanted to intervene in Syria against ISIS today, short of a full invasion, it would somehow need to enlist either Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who benefits from ISIS's existence, or the moderate Syrian rebels, who are disorganized and hard-pressed by Assad already, to coordinate a major offensive. That seems improbable, to say the least.
Even if the United States reinvaded Iraq to destroy ISIS – which there is no indication it would do – there's no guarantee that even this would succeed. The United States did defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq in the late-2000s, but it had lots of Iraqi help. The Bush administration's 2007 troop surge would have failed if the Sunni population wasn't already turning against al-Qaeda there.
"I take the somewhat modest position that the action of 6 million Iraqis may be more important than those of 30,000 American troops and one very talented general," Doug Ollivant, the National Security Adviser for Iraq from 2005 to 2009, told me. Without changing Sunni views of ISIS and the Iraqi government, a stepped-up US ground presence might only further infuriate the Sunni population.
The key structural causes of ISIS's rise, the multi-sided Syrian war and Iraqi sectarian tension, cannot be solved by American bombs alone. The US can block ISIS's advances in some places, as it is doing in Iraqi Kurdistan, but eliminating ISIS is outside its power.

http://www.vox.com/cards/isis-myths-iraq/us-obama-ISIS

 

[Stu]

Myth #8: ISIS will self-destruct on its own

You occasionally hear, especially from supporters of the Obama administration's cautious policy, that ISIS will eventually destroy itself. ISIS's view of Islamic law is so harsh that no population would want to live under it for long, so a Sunni revolt against ISIS is inevitable. And ISIS will overreach: its desire to expand to new territory exceeds its actual military power, meaning that a devastating counterattack is inevitable.
This is certainly possible. But ISIS is not headed in that direction yet. That's because ISIS is both smarter and stronger than many people give it credit for.
ISIS learned from the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq, its predecessor group. Though ISIS still insists on imposing its extremist interpretation of Islamic law in the territory it controls, it also sets up institutions that look a lot like a proto-government. They've installed health care clinics, run public forums where ISIS operatives socialize with adults, held activities for children, policed neighborhoods, and collected taxes.


The point of this, Washington Institute fellow Aaron Zelin wrote in September 2013, is to "lay the groundwork for a future Islamic state by gradually socializing Syrians to the concept." According to Zelin, "ISIS has shown that it wants to avoid repeating the mistakes that its predecessors made in Iraq." Since occupying Mosul in June, Iraq's second-largest city, ISIS's behavior has been similar (though not identical).
ISIS, then, is balancing its ideological desire to be brutal against its strategic imperative not to maintain the support of local populations. It's still as evil as it always was – just smarter about it.
To make matters worse, ISIS has never been stronger in military terms. The incorporation of former officers with Saddam-era Iraq, plus years of fighting in Syria, has made ISIS more tactically astute than most of its battlefield opponents. In June, it captured enormous amounts of advanced American weaponry dropped by the retreating Iraqi army. And its ranks have swelled in the wake of all of its victories: one estimate, from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, claimed that ISIS recruited 6,000 fighters in July 2014 alone. That's obviously a ballpark estimate, but it almost certainly reflects real growth inside ISIS.
The bottom line: ISIS does not appear at all bound to simply fall apart on its own. To defeat the group, Iraqis and Syrians would need to do something done to separate ISIS from its base of support in Iraq and Syria. And ISIS needs to be broken on the battlefield, if only to stop the recruiting drive created by its aura of invincibility.

http://www.vox.com/cards/isis-myths-iraq/go-away-isis

 

[Stu]

Myth #9: ISIS is invincible

Reading the news of ISIS's conquests in Iraq and Syria, and even its recent foray into Lebanon, you might get the sense that ISIS is unstoppable. That it'll sweep Iraq, and really, truly, establish an extremist Islamic state in Iraq and eastern Syria.
This isn't true. ISIS is smarter and more effective than it used to be, and it's too strong to collapse on its own, but it's still quite vulnerable. The Iraqi government, with Kurdish and American help, really could make major inroads against ISIS.
In June, when ISIS was sweeping Iraq, there were panicked predictions that Baghdad was about to fall to ISIS's advance. It didn't. ISIS didn't even try to take the city, likely because it knew it couldn't dislodge the huge concentrations of Iraqi troops there – or hold a majority-Shia city that would never accept it.
Iraqi demographics place a natural limit on ISIS's advance. Even high-end estimates of ISIS's strength – 50,000 troops – make it much smaller than the Iraqi army or Kurdish peshmerga. It'd be impossible for ISIS to take and hold majority Shia areas, where they'd be totally unable to build popular support. The Islamic State's borders in Iraq are limited to northern and western, Arab-majority, Sunni-majority Iraq.
That's a damning problem for ISIS. All of the major oil wells, which provide 95 percent of Iraq's GDP, are in southern Iraq or Kurdish-held territory in the northeast. ISIS can't advance on the Shia south, and a joint US-Kurdish campaign is reversing its gains in Kurdistan. ISIS has huge financial reserves for a militant group – maybe up to $1 billion dollars. But that's a relatively small amount for a government, and any attempt to actually govern northwestern Iraq in the long run would lead to economic disaster.


"It'd be a permanent downward economic spiral – like Gaza, basically," Kirk Sowell, a risk analyst and Iraq expert, says. An ISIS mini-state is just not sustainable.
When you pair the inevitable economic crisis in ISIS-held Iraq with ISIS's brutal legal system, it seems like Sunnis will eventually tire of the group. That discontent may not be enough on its own to end the group's rule, especially if it still believes the Iraqi central government would be worse for them. But it creates an opening for Iraqi Prime Minister-delegate Haider al-Abadi to reach out to disaffected Sunnis. He might be able to make allies among Sunni tribal militias.
Meanwhile, ISIS may alienate some its core Iraqi allies: militias who support a Saddam-style Sunni dictatorship. They're generally secular and no fans of ISIS's vision of Islamic law, and are only allied with it to fight the government. If ISIS's Sunni allies turn against it, and the government does a better job making its rule look attractive, ISIS may lose the Sunni population – and most of its gains in northern Iraq. Again, that's not inevitable, and will require some tough political changes in Baghdad, but the point is that ISIS is far from invincible.
ISIS's hold in Syria, though, would be much, much harder to dislodge. It's hard to imagine either Assad or moderate anti-Assad rebels mounting an effective military campaign against ISIS in the near term. But rolling back ISIS in Iraq, and containing it to Syria, would be a major victory, though an incomplete one as it would leave ISIS with a chunk of Syria. Still, this would limit the group's reach in the Middle East and blunt its global appeal. And when Syria's civil war finally does end, whenever that happens, eliminating ISIS will be the winning side's first priority.

http://www.vox.com/cards/isis-myths-iraq/isis-invincible