Who is ISIS?

[qazplm]

Building on the what does ISIS believe, and the commentary on the statement one public official made that it's not enough to merely kill ISIS members...

ISIS is either one of two things:

1) A group of extremists who to an individual all equally believe in religious extremism thus there is nothing to do but kill them.

2) A group with both people in group 1, and disaffected, poor, marginalized, and angry people who might not have joined but for poverty, disenfranchisement, poor education, threats to them or their loved ones, or just living in the wrong place.

If it's nothing but 1, then the idea that we have to do more than just kill them all doesn't make sense.

If it's 1 and 2, then all of the critiques about that comment from the public official that you have to BOTH kill them and stop folks from signing on, is exactly what you need to do.

I'll note it is also exactly what Petraeus and most of the people who do counter-terrorism for a living say you have to do.

IMO, it's like having multiple paths to attacking a disease, one direct, one indirect (chemo and diet for example).

 

[Purdue97]

I think the one thing the USA, well everyone has to stop doing is stating that ISIS is extremists, perverting Islam, and disadvantaged people.

Salafism accounts for the beliefs of 3-4% of Muslims, which ends up equating to roughly 55 million people. They are also all Sunni who by estimated to be 75-90% of all Muslims. Instead of painting these people as rogue extremists, I think it is past time to acknowledge that this is a pretty large group of people that are guilty of literally translating the Koran.

When you combine this with the fact that people in the middle east/eastern Africa, tend to gravitate toward strong leaders(even bad dictatorships), have complete devotion to their faith first, this has the potential to snowball into a much larger issue than it is now.

Not so sure direct involvement by the USA is the best option. But supplying Jordan and the Kurds with money and arms needs to be ramped up. They can fight. Training the Iraqi, KSA, UAE, and Kuwaiti armies to be able to fight their way out of a wet paper bag is highly recomended too. Fighting a larger scale war is much different that counter terror which the Saudis are pretty good at. I also think that with many of the rebels in Syria belonging to these "radical muslim groups" it might be time to stay neutral there or do an about face. Not that I like the guy but Assad is the best of two crap choices IMO.

The biggest issue IMO, is that there are not a whole to of schools to compete versus the Madrasas. Really a big time opportunity was lost between 2003 and 2010 to establish something. That, and when you look at it, KSA who is threatened by ISIS, has given credibility to Salafism over the years.

Different link

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/opinion/the-saudis-can-crush-isis.html

This post was edited on 2/24 8:02 PM by Purdue97

NYT

 

[qazplm]

That's an amazing bit of math

so you've taken a very small group, aligned them with salafism, even though the latter group doesn't act remotely like ISIS does, then further align them with all Sunnis, even though the VAST majority of them don't agree remotely with ISIS, and turned rogue extremists into 3/4s of a billion people.