A Kurdish fighter keeps guard while overlooking positions of Islamic State militants near Mosul in northern Iraq August 19, 2014. Youssef Boudlal/Reuters
Mary Dejevsky, The Independent: Why Isis won't actually be the huge threat of 2016
If Isis cannot keep order, if it cannot delegate power when it moves on, then its authority may wane.
Viewed from a Western perspective, 2015 was defined by the predations of Isis. The year opened with killings in Paris, and it drew to a close with attacks on youth and pleasure in the same city. In between, Western tourists, many of them British, were gunned down in Tunisia; in Syria, what remained of the classical city Palmyra was ravaged; and a Russian tourist flight crashed in Sinai, believed to have been brought down by a bomb.
Each new atrocity prompted a fresh amplification of alarmist rhetoric. After the Tunisia attacks in June, David Cameron described the fight against Isis as the “struggle of our generation”, stating the terrorist group presented an “existential threat” to the West. When MPs voted to extend anti-Isis air strikes to Syria earlier this month, their speeches were peppered with references to fascism. Before the Russians sent their air force into action in Syria, President Putin called for a broad international alliance, such as the one that had defeated Hitler.
WNU Editor: Pre-9/11 groups like Al Qaeda and others had a core group of a few hundred fighters .... and tens of thousands of supporters. Flash forward to today .... groups like Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Al Shabaab, etc. .... they now have tens of thousands of fighters .... and probably a few million supporters. An objective analysis would conclude that the trend lines do not look good .... hence it is hard to believe the argument that groups like the Islamic State will not really a huge threat in 2016.
If Western wars against Muslim countries would wane, then so would the reaction against them wane, and that includes weak organizations like al-Qaeda and ISIS, which after all were largely Western constructs. The danger comes from the Western interests who don't want this waning. There's no profit in it (peace) for the capitalists.
ReplyDelete