Tag: Islamic state

“Nobody joins a cult. Nobody joins something they think’s gonna hurt them. You join a religious organization, you join a political movement...” –Deborah Layton

Trump is said to be seeking ways to accelerate the campaign against Daesh.

Daesh is facing its final year as a state. As it goes down it is lashing out like a fatally wounded crocodile.

The line of the Obama administration had been that US troops on the ground in Iraq and Syria were only trainers and advisors. But US forces have exceeded that role.

The killings in Brussels or Paris and the killings in U.S. military strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria or Libya perpetuate the same dark lusts. The savage tit-for-tat game will not end until we rouse ourselves from our hypnotized state.

Is it time to panic? Let's put terror threats into perspective for 2016.

For a rich and powerful nation to conclude that it has no choice but to engage in quasi-permanent armed conflict in the far reaches of the planet represents the height of folly. Power confers choice.

All of this is like manna from heaven for the Islamic State, the more “pitiless” the better. Their dream is to live in a black-and-white world of utter religious and political clarity (and calamity), while engaging in what American pundits like to term a “clash of civilizations.”

Al-Zawahiri, a mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and successor of Bin Laden, is urging for the unity between al-Qaeda and Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) in the face of American, Russian and Shiite forces in Syria. Things just got more complicated for the CIA.

While ISIS continues to haunt the nightmares of Western journalists and security analysts, Juan Cole points out some assertions about the "Islamic State" that are truly exaggerated and completely incorrect.