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Friday, March 20, 2015

Audrey Kurth Cronin | Don’t Use Counterterrorism to Fight ISIS | Foreign Affairs

Audrey Kurth Cronin | Don’t Use Counterterrorism to Fight ISIS | Foreign Affairs

ISIS Is Not a Terrorist Group
Why
Counterterrorism Won’t Stop the Latest Jihadist Threat

After 9/11, many within the U.S. national
security establishment worried that, following decades of preparation for
confronting conventional enemies, Washington was unready for the challenge
posed by an unconventional adversary such as al Qaeda. So over the next decade,
the United States built an elaborate bureaucratic structure to fight the
jihadist organization, adapting its military and its intelligence and law
enforcement agencies to the tasks of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.

Now, however, a different group, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham
(ISIS), which also calls itself the Islamic State, has supplanted al Qaeda as
the jihadist threat of greatest concern. ISIS’ ideology, rhetoric, and
long-term goals are similar to al Qaeda’s, and the two groups were once
formally allied. So many observers assume that the current challenge is simply
to refocus Washington’s now-formidable counterterrorism apparatus on a new
target.

But ISIS is not al Qaeda. It is not an outgrowth or a part of the older
radical Islamist organization, nor does it represent the next phase in its
evolution. Although al Qaeda remains dangerous—especially its affiliates in
North Africa and Yemen—ISIS is its successor. ISIS represents the post–al Qaeda
jihadist threat.

In a nationally televised speech last September explaining his plan to
“degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS, U.S. President Barack Obama drew a
straight line between the group and Al Qaeda and claimed that ISIS is “a
terrorist organization, pure and simple.” This was mistaken; ISIS hardly fits
that description, and indeed, although it uses terrorism as a tactic, it is not
really a terrorist organization at all. Terrorist networks, such as al Qaeda,
generally have only dozens or hundreds of members, attack civilians, do not
hold territory, and cannot directly confront military forces. ISIS, on the
other hand, boasts some 30,000 fighters, holds territory in both Iraq and
Syria, maintains extensive military capabilities, controls lines of
communication, commands infrastructure, funds itself, and engages in
sophisticated military operations. If ISIS is purely and simply anything, it is
a pseudo-state led by a conventional army. And that is why the counterterrorism
and counterinsurgency strategies that greatly diminished the threat from al
Qaeda will not work against ISIS.

The strategies that greatly diminished the threat from al Qaeda will not
work against ISIS.

Washington has been slow to adapt its policies in Iraq and Syria to the true
nature of the threat from ISIS. In Syria, U.S. counterterrorism has mostly
prioritized the bombing of al Qaeda affiliates, which has given an edge to ISIS
and has also provided the Assad regime with the opportunity to crush
U.S.-allied moderate Syrian rebels. In Iraq, Washington continues to rely on a
form of counterinsurgency, depending on the central government in Baghdad to
regain its lost legitimacy, unite the country, and build indigenous forces to
defeat ISIS. These approaches were developed to meet a different threat, and
they have been overtaken by events. What’s needed now is a strategy of
“offensive containment”: a combination of limited military tactics and a broad
diplomatic strategy to halt ISIS’ expansion, isolate the group, and degrade its
capabilities.

DIFFERENT STROKES
The differences between al Qaeda and ISIS are partly rooted in their
histories. Al Qaeda came into being in the aftermath of the 1979 Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. Its leaders’ worldviews and strategic thinking were
shaped by the ten-year war against Soviet occupation, when thousands of Muslim
militants, including Osama bin Laden, converged on the country. As the
organization coalesced, it took the form of a global network focused on
carrying out spectacular attacks against Western or Western-allied targets,
with the goal of rallying Muslims to join a global confrontation with secular
powers near and far.

ISIS came into being thanks to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. In its
earliest incarnation, it was just one of a number of Sunni extremist groups
fighting U.S. forces and attacking Shiite civilians in an attempt to foment a
sectarian civil war. At that time, it was called al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and
its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had pledged allegiance to bin Laden. Zarqawi
was killed by a U.S. air strike in 2006, and soon after, AQI was nearly wiped
out when Sunni tribes decided to partner with the Americans to confront the
jihadists. But the defeat was temporary; AQI renewed itself inside U.S.-run
prisons in Iraq, where insurgents and terrorist operatives connected and formed
networks—and where the group’s current chief and self-proclaimed caliph, Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi, first distinguished himself as a leader.

In 2011, as a revolt against the Assad regime in Syria expanded into a
full-blown civil war, the group took advantage of the chaos, seizing territory
in Syria’s northeast, establishing a base of operations, and rebranding itself
as ISIS. In Iraq, the group continued to capitalize on the weakness of the
central state and to exploit the country’s sectarian strife, which intensified
after U.S. combat forces withdrew. With the Americans gone, Iraqi Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki pursued a hard-line pro-Shiite agenda, further
alienating Sunni Arabs throughout the country. ISIS now counts among its
members Iraqi Sunni tribal leaders, former anti-U.S. insurgents, and even
secular former Iraqi military officers who seek to regain the power and
security they enjoyed during the Saddam Hussein era.

The group’s territorial conquest in Iraq came as a shock. When ISIS captured
Fallujah and Ramadi in January 2014, most analysts predicted that the
U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces would contain the threat. But in June, amid
mass desertions from the Iraqi army, ISIS moved toward Baghdad, capturing Mosul,
Tikrit, al-Qaim, and numerous other Iraqi towns. By the end of the month, ISIS
had renamed itself the Islamic State and had proclaimed the territory under its
control to be a new caliphate. Meanwhile, according to U.S. intelligence
estimates, some 15,000 foreign fighters from 80 countries flocked to the region
to join ISIS, at the rate of around 1,000 per month. Although most of these
recruits came from Muslim-majority countries, such as Tunisia and Saudi Arabia,
some also hailed from Australia, China, Russia, and western European countries.
ISIS has even managed to attract some American teenagers, boys and girls alike,
from ordinary middle-class homes in Denver, Minneapolis, and the suburbs of
Chicago.

As ISIS has grown, its goals and intentions have become clearer. Al Qaeda
conceived of itself as the vanguard of a global insurgency mobilizing Muslim
communities against secular rule. ISIS, in contrast, seeks to control territory
and create a “pure” Sunni Islamist state governed by a brutal interpretation of
sharia; to immediately obliterate the political borders of the Middle East that
were created by Western powers in the twentieth century; and to position itself
as the sole political, religious, and military authority over all of the
world’s Muslims.

NOT THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Since ISIS’ origins and goals differ markedly from al Qaeda’s, the two
groups operate in completely different ways. That is why a U.S.
counterterrorism strategy custom-made to fight al Qaeda does not fit the
struggle against ISIS.

In the post-9/11 era, the United States has built up a trillion-dollar
infrastructure of intelligence, law enforcement, and military operations aimed
at al Qaeda and its affiliates. According to a 2010 investigation by The
Washington Post
, some 263 U.S. government organizations were created or
reorganized in response to the 9/11 attacks, including the Department of
Homeland Security, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Transportation
Security Administration. Each year, U.S. intelligence agencies produce some
50,000 reports on terrorism. Fifty-one U.S. federal organizations and military
commands track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks. This structure
has helped make terrorist attacks on U.S. soil exceedingly rare. In that sense,
the system has worked. But it is not well suited for dealing with ISIS, which
presents a different sort of challenge.

ISIS’ sales pitch to recruits is conquest in all its forms, including the
sexual kind.

Consider first the tremendous U.S. military and intelligence campaign to
capture or kill al Qaeda’s core leadership through drone strikes and Special
Forces raids. Some 75 percent of the leaders of the core al Qaeda group have
been killed by raids and armed drones, a technology well suited to the task of
going after targets hiding in rural areas, where the risk of accidentally
killing civilians is lower.

Such tactics, however, don’t hold much promise for combating ISIS. The
group’s fighters and leaders cluster in urban areas, where they are well
integrated into civilian populations and usually surrounded by buildings,
making drone strikes and raids much harder to carry out. And simply killing
ISIS’ leaders would not cripple the organization. They govern a functioning
pseudo-state with a complex administrative structure. At the top of the
military command is the emirate, which consists of Baghdadi and two deputies,
both of whom formerly served as generals in the Saddam-era Iraqi army: Abu Ali
al-Anbari, who controls ISIS’ operations in Syria, and Abu Muslim al-Turkmani,
who controls operations in Iraq. ISIS’ civilian bureaucracy is supervised by 12
administrators who govern territories in Iraq and Syria, overseeing councils
that handle matters such as finances, media, and religious affairs. Although it
is hardly the model government depicted in ISIS’ propaganda videos, this
pseudo-state would carry on quite ably without Baghdadi or his closest
lieutenants.

ISIS also poses a daunting challenge to traditional U.S. counterterrorism
tactics that take aim at jihadist financing, propaganda, and recruitment.
Cutting off al Qaeda’s funding has been one of U.S. counterterrorism’s most
impressive success stories. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI and the CIA
began to coordinate closely on financial intelligence, and they were soon
joined by the Department of Defense. FBI agents embedded with U.S. military
units during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and debriefed suspected terrorists
detained at the U.S. facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In 2004, the U.S.
Treasury Department established the Office of Terrorism and Financial
Intelligence, which has cut deeply into al Qaeda’s ability to profit from money
laundering and receive funds under the cover of charitable giving. A global
network for countering terrorist financing has also emerged, backed by the UN,
the EU, and hundreds of cooperating governments. The result has been a serious
squeeze on al Qaeda’s financing; by 2011, the Treasury Department reported that
al Qaeda was “struggling to secure steady financing to plan and execute
terrorist attacks.”

But such tools contribute little to the fight against ISIS, because ISIS
does not need outside funding. Holding territory has allowed the group to build
a self-sustaining financial model unthinkable for most terrorist groups. Beginning
in 2012, ISIS gradually took over key oil assets in eastern Syria; it now
controls an estimated 60 percent of the country’s oil production capacity.
Meanwhile, during its push into Iraq last summer, ISIS also seized seven
oil-producing operations in that country. The group manages to sell some of
this oil on the black market in Iraq and Syria—including, according to some
reports, to the Assad regime itself. ISIS also smuggles oil out of Iraq and
Syria into Jordan and Turkey, where it finds plenty of buyers happy to pay
below-market prices for illicit crude. All told, ISIS’ revenue from oil is
estimated to be between $1 million and $3 million per day.

And oil is only one element in the group’s financial portfolio. Last June,
when ISIS seized control of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, it looted the
provincial central bank and other smaller banks and plundered antiquities to
sell on the black market. It steals jewelry, cars, machinery, and livestock
from conquered residents. The group also controls major transportation arteries
in western Iraq, allowing it to tax the movement of goods and charge tolls. It
even earns revenue from cotton and wheat grown in Raqqa, the breadbasket of
Syria.

Of course, like terrorist groups, ISIS also takes hostages, demanding tens
of millions of dollars in ransom payments. But more important to the group’s
finances is a wide-ranging extortion racket that targets owners and producers
in ISIS territory, taxing everything from small family farms to large
enterprises such as cell-phone service providers, water delivery companies, and
electric utilities. The enterprise is so complex that the U.S. Treasury has
declined to estimate ISIS’ total assets and revenues, but ISIS is clearly a
highly diversified enterprise whose wealth dwarfs that of any terrorist
organization. And there is little evidence that Washington has succeeded in
reducing the group’s coffers.

SEX AND THE SINGLE JIHADIST
Another aspect of U.S. counterterrorism that has worked well against al
Qaeda is the effort to delegitimize the group by publicizing its targeting
errors and violent excesses—or by helping U.S. allies do so. Al Qaeda’s attacks
frequently kill Muslims, and the group’s leaders are highly sensitive to the
risk this poses to their image as the vanguard of a mass Muslim movement.
Attacks in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey in 2003; Spain in 2004; and Jordan
and the United Kingdom in 2005 all resulted in Muslim casualties that outraged
members of Islamic communities everywhere and reduced support for al Qaeda
across the Muslim world. The group has steadily lost popular support since
around 2007; today, al Qaeda is widely reviled in the Muslim world. The Pew
Research Center surveyed nearly 9,000 Muslims in 11 countries in 2013 and found
a high median level of disapproval of al Qaeda: 57 percent. In many countries,
the number was far higher: 96 percent of Muslims polled in Lebanon, 81 percent
in Jordan, 73 percent in Turkey, and 69 percent in Egypt held an unfavorable
view of al Qaeda.

ISIS, however, seems impervious to the risk of a backlash. In proclaiming
himself the caliph, Baghdadi made a bold (if absurd) claim to religious
authority. But ISIS’ core message is about raw power and revenge, not
legitimacy. Its brutality—videotaped beheadings, mass executions—is designed to
intimidate foes and suppress dissent. Revulsion among Muslims at such cruelty
might eventually undermine ISIS. But for the time being, Washington’s focus on
ISIS’ savagery only helps the group augment its aura of strength.

For similar reasons, it has proved difficult for the United States and its
partners to combat the recruitment efforts that have attracted so many young
Muslims to ISIS’ ranks. The core al Qaeda group attracted followers with
religious arguments and a pseudo-scholarly message of altruism for the sake of
the ummah, the global Muslim community. Bin Laden and his longtime
second-in-command and successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, carefully constructed an
image of religious legitimacy and piety. In their propaganda videos, the men
appeared as ascetic warriors, sitting on the ground in caves, studying in
libraries, or taking refuge in remote camps. Although some of al Qaeda’s
affiliates have better recruiting pitches, the core group cast the
establishment of a caliphate as a long-term, almost utopian goal: educating and
mobilizing the ummah came first. In al Qaeda, there is no place for
alcohol or women. In this sense, al Qaeda’s image is deeply unsexy; indeed, for
the young al Qaeda recruit, sex itself comes only after marriage—or martyrdom.

Even for the angriest young Muslim man, this might be a bit of a hard sell.
Al Qaeda’s leaders’ attempts to depict themselves as moral—even
moralistic—figures have limited their appeal. Successful deradicalization
programs in places such as Indonesia and Singapore have zeroed in on the
mismatch between what al Qaeda offers and what most young people are really
interested in, encouraging militants to reintegrate into society, where their
more prosaic hopes and desires might be fulfilled more readily.

ISIS, in contrast, offers a very different message for young men, and
sometimes women. The group attracts followers yearning for not only religious
righteousness but also adventure, personal power, and a sense of self and community.
And, of course, some people just want to kill—and ISIS welcomes them, too. The
group’s brutal violence attracts attention, demonstrates dominance, and draws
people to the action.

ISIS operates in urban settings and offers recruits immediate opportunities
to fight. It advertises by distributing exhilarating podcasts produced by
individual fighters on the frontlines. The group also procures sexual partners
for its male recruits; some of these women volunteer for this role, but most of
them are coerced or even enslaved. The group barely bothers to justify this
behavior in religious terms; its sales pitch is conquest in all its forms,
including the sexual kind. And it has already established a self-styled
caliphate, with Baghdadi as the caliph, thus making present (if only in a
limited way, for now) what al Qaeda generally held out as something more akin
to a utopian future.

In short, ISIS offers short-term, primitive gratification. It does not
radicalize people in ways that can be countered by appeals to logic. Teenagers
are attracted to the group without even understanding what it is, and older
fighters just want to be associated with ISIS’ success. Compared with fighting
al Qaeda’s relatively austere message, Washington has found it much harder to counter
ISIS’ more visceral appeal, perhaps for a very simple reason: a desire for
power, agency, and instant results also pervades American culture.

2015 ≠ 2006
Counterterrorism wasn’t the only element of national security practice that
Washington rediscovered and reinvigorated after 9/11; counterinsurgency also
enjoyed a renaissance. As chaos erupted in Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S.
invasion and occupation of 2003, the U.S. military grudgingly starting thinking
about counterinsurgency, a subject that had fallen out of favor in the national
security establishment after the Vietnam War. The most successful application
of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine was the 2007 “surge” in Iraq, overseen by
General David Petraeus. In 2006, as violence peaked in Sunni-dominated Anbar
Province, U.S. officials concluded that the United States was losing the war.
In response, President George W. Bush decided to send an additional 20,000 U.S.
troops to Iraq. General John Allen, then serving as deputy commander of the multinational
forces in Anbar, cultivated relationships with local Sunni tribes and nurtured
the so-called Sunni Awakening, in which some 40 Sunni tribes or subtribes
essentially switched sides and decided to fight with the newly augmented U.S.
forces against AQI. By the summer of 2008, the number of insurgent attacks had
fallen by more than 80 percent.

Looking at the extent of ISIS’ recent gains in Sunni areas of Iraq, which
have undone much of the progress made in the surge, some have argued that
Washington should respond with a second application of the Iraq war’s
counterinsurgency strategy. And the White House seems at least partly persuaded
by this line of thinking: last year, Obama asked Allen to act as a special
envoy for building an anti-ISIS coalition in the region. There is a certain
logic to this approach, since ISIS draws support from many of the same
insurgent groups that the surge and the Sunni Awakening neutralized—groups that
have reemerged as threats thanks to the vacuum created by the withdrawal of
U.S. forces in 2011 and Maliki’s sectarian rule in Baghdad.

But vast differences exist between the situation today and the one that
Washington faced in 2006, and the logic of U.S. counterinsurgency does not suit
the struggle against ISIS. The United States cannot win the hearts and minds of
Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, because the Maliki government has already lost them. The
Shiite-dominated Iraqi government has so badly undercut its own political
legitimacy that it might be impossible to restore it. Moreover, the United
States no longer occupies Iraq. Washington can send in more troops, but it
cannot lend legitimacy to a government it no longer controls. ISIS is less an
insurgent group fighting against an established government than one party in a
conventional civil war between a breakaway territory and a weak central state.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER?
The United States has relied on counterinsurgency strategy not only to
reverse Iraq’s slide into state failure but also to serve as a model for how to
combat the wider jihadist movement. Al Qaeda expanded by persuading Muslim
militant groups all over the world to turn their more narrowly targeted
nationalist campaigns into nodes in al Qaeda’s global jihad—and, sometimes, to
convert themselves into al Qaeda affiliates. But there was little commonality
in the visions pursued by Chechen, Filipino, Indonesian, Kashmiri, Palestinian,
and Uighur militants, all of whom bin Laden tried to draw into al Qaeda’s tent,
and al Qaeda often had trouble fully reconciling its own goals with the
interests of its far-flung affiliates.

That created a vulnerability, and the United States and its allies sought to
exploit it. Governments in Indonesia and the Philippines won dramatic victories
against al Qaeda affiliates in their countries by combining counterterrorism
operations with relationship building in local communities, instituting
deradicalization programs, providing religious training in prisons, using
rehabilitated former terrorist operatives as government spokespeople, and
sometimes negotiating over local grievances.

Some observers have called for Washington to apply the same strategy to ISIS
by attempting to expose the fault lines between the group’s secular former
Iraqi army officers, Sunni tribal leaders, and Sunni resistance fighters, on
the one hand, and its veteran jihadists, on the other. But it’s too late for
that approach to work. ISIS is now led by well-trained, capable former Iraqi
military leaders who know U.S. techniques and habits because Washington helped
train them. And after routing Iraqi army units and taking their U.S.-supplied
equipment, ISIS is now armed with American tanks, artillery, armored Humvees,
and mine-resistant vehicles.

Perhaps ISIS’ harsh religious fanaticism will eventually prove too much for
their secular former Baathist allies. But for now, the Saddam-era officers are
far from reluctant warriors for ISIS: rather, they are leading the charge. In
their hands, ISIS has developed a sophisticated light-infantry army,
brandishing American weapons.

Of course, this opens up a third possible approach to ISIS, besides
counterterrorism and counterinsurgency: a full-on conventional war against the
group, waged with the goal of completely destroying it. Such a war would be
folly. After experiencing more than a decade of continuous war, the American
public simply would not support the long-term occupation and intense fighting
that would be required to obliterate ISIS. The pursuit of a full-fledged
military campaign would exhaust U.S. resources and offer little hope of
obtaining the objective. Wars pursued at odds with political reality cannot be
won.

CONTAINING THE THREAT
The sobering fact is that the United States has no good military options in
its fight against ISIS. Neither counterterrorism, nor counterinsurgency, nor
conventional warfare is likely to afford Washington a clear-cut victory against
the group. For the time being, at least, the policy that best matches ends and
means and that has the best chance of securing U.S. interests is one of
offensive containment: combining a limited military campaign with a major
diplomatic and economic effort to weaken ISIS and align the interests of the
many countries that are threatened by the group’s advance.

ISIS is not merely an American problem. The wars in Iraq and Syria involve
not only regional players but also major global actors, such as Russia, Turkey,
Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states. Washington must stop behaving as if
it can fix the region’s problems with military force and instead resurrect its
role as a diplomatic superpower.

Of course, U.S. military force would be an important part of an offensive
containment policy. Air strikes can pin ISIS down, and cutting off its supply
of technology, weapons, and ammunition by choking off smuggling routes would
further weaken the group. Meanwhile, the United States should continue to
advise and support the Iraqi military, assist regional forces such as the
Kurdish Pesh Merga, and provide humanitarian assistance to civilians fleeing
ISIS’ territory. Washington should also expand its assistance to neighboring
countries such as Jordan and Lebanon, which are struggling to contend with the
massive flow of refugees from Syria. But putting more U.S. troops on the ground
would be counterproductive, entangling the United States in an unwinnable war
that could go on for decades. The United States cannot rebuild the Iraqi state
or determine the outcome of the Syrian civil war. Frustrating as it might be to
some, when it comes to military action, Washington should stick to a realistic
course that recognizes the limitations of U.S. military force as a long-term
solution.

The Obama administration’s recently convened “summit on countering violent
extremism”—which brought world leaders to Washington to discuss how to combat
radical jihadism—was a valuable exercise. But although it highlighted the
existing threat posed by al Qaeda’s regional affiliates, it also reinforced the
idea that ISIS is primarily a counterterrorism challenge. In fact, ISIS poses a
much greater risk: it seeks to challenge the current international order, and,
unlike the greatly diminished core al Qaeda organization, it is coming closer
to actually achieving that goal. The United States cannot single-handedly
defend the region and the world from an aggressive revisionist theocratic
state—nor should it. The major powers must develop a common diplomatic,
economic, and military approach to ensure that this pseudo-state is tightly
contained and treated as a global pariah. The good news is that no government
supports ISIS; the group has managed to make itself an enemy of every state in
the region—and, indeed, the world. To exploit that fact, Washington should
pursue a more aggressive, top-level diplomatic agenda with major powers and
regional players, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, the United
Kingdom, Russia, and even China, as well as Iraq’s and Syria’s neighbors, to
design a unified response to ISIS.

That response must go beyond making a mutual commitment to prevent the
radicalization and recruitment of would-be jihadists and beyond the regional
military coalition that the United States has built. The major powers and
regional players must agree to stiffen the international arms embargo currently
imposed on ISIS, enact more vigorous sanctions against the group, conduct joint
border patrols, provide more aid for displaced persons and refugees, and
strengthen UN peacekeeping missions in countries that border Iraq and Syria.
Although some of these tools overlap with counterterrorism, they should be put
in the service of a strategy for fighting an enemy more akin to a state actor:
ISIS is not a nuclear power, but the group represents a threat to international
stability equivalent to that posed by North Korea. It should be treated no less
seriously.

Given that political posturing over U.S. foreign policy will only intensify
as the 2016 U.S. presidential election approaches, the White House would likely
face numerous attacks on a containment approach that would satisfy neither the
hawkish nor the anti-interventionist camp within the U.S. national security
establishment. In the face of such criticism, the United States must stay
committed to fighting ISIS over the long term in a manner that matches ends
with means, calibrating and improving U.S. efforts to contain the group by
moving past outmoded forms of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency while also
resisting pressure to cross the threshold into full-fledged war. Over time, the
successful containment of ISIS might open up better policy options. But for the
foreseeable future, containment is the best policy that the United States can
pursue.

COMMENT:

Fighting
conventional war is easier as armed forces of the countries are all trained to
face such fight or war is trained as such but fighting unconventional war
become very difficult and costly with unknown figure of casualties and financial
expenditure including nature of damage. With this in view US prepared its armed
force to confront the unconventional warfare of the jihadists in the form of
anti terrorist’s warfare after 9/11.

The entire world believes that all terrorist fight is with off shoots of Al Qaeda
as US reformed its armed forces to fight any formidable terrorist organization.

It has to be understood that ISIS is not Al Qaeda nor it is any off shoot of
Al Qaeda. ISIS represents the post–Al Qaeda jihadist's threat. As ISIS is
not an off shoot of anything like Al Qaeda the counter terrorism and
counterinsurgency operation would have no effect on it, much to the
super power’s surprise.

Therefore, the strategies adopted that greatly diminished the threat from
al Qaeda will not be effective against ISIS.

To cut a very long story short according to the development until now this
ISIS would deal a final blow to Israel’s existence not because of JEWISH
hub but because of the brutish policy regular committal of genocide by the
present political party in power.

It must be considered from the point that whatever may be the cause the
affiliation ISIS is a combination of International brotherhood of Muslims.

 A war would be too big a price to pay for by Israel.

The author has very rightly pointed out the facts that might affect the
world at large avoiding the impact of rearing the terrorist state of Israel
as its best friend and most trusted ally. In this fast changing world, none
could claim to be best friend and trusted ally. None does work for others without
any self-interest and material gain.

The day, God forbid if US gets into trouble none would come forward to help.

In addition, that Israel has recently proved very
openly including his clans in the US congress what type of a vicious friend it
is. American nation needs to look more for its own interest instead of others
that too for terrorist state’s interests.

Days ahead seem to be extremely very difficult and tough, UK, French,
Germany and many other country are breaking of

is an ominous signal for the future, not only for US activities but for Israel

is being reared by it, a terrorist country that has vitiated the world peace. In
addition,

this ISIS is going to be a global menace which by its own right fight
highhandedly as at this moment none of the super power has the capability to
run

war or fight over a long sustained period of time. Israel’s WMDS may prove a
deathnail for itself in any war. This is just a reminder based on what has happened
and is happening, in pursuit to diminish ISIS.








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