

The War Nerd: Here’s everything you need to know about “too extreme” I.S.I.S - lisper
http://pando.com/2014/06/16/the-war-nerd-heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-too-extreme-for-al-qaeda-i-s-i-s/

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lisper
The money quote (and the headline I would like to have submitted this under
but for HN regulations): "ISIS is a physics demonstration in guerrilla form"

Context:

> It’s amazing how well combat selects for talent. Nothing rewards talent less
> than a peacetime army, and nothing rewards it faster than an army actually
> in combat. And irregular forces, which usually suffer something like a 10:1
> casualty rate against conventional occupiers, go through a nightmare-quick
> selection process.

> ISIS went through a lot of commanders before one stuck. He was a product of
> Islamic schools and US prison camps. He called himself Abu Bakr al Baghdadi,
> which means exactly nothing except that he’s claiming to be from Baghdad. He
> got out of prison in 2009 and walked into a leadership vacuum created by an
> airstrike which killed his predecessor—nothing like airstrikes to make room
> at the top—and oversaw ISIS’s move away from pressure once again, out of the
> cities toward the deserts of Anbar Province where Sunni sheikhs maintained
> strong clan networks. It wasn’t much, but it was a safe base, and that’s
> something any mixed militia/guerrilla force requires.

> ISIS got its second great break when The Syrian Civil War exploded in 2012.
> They looked west, across the Anbar deserts, and saw a huge organizational
> opportunity opening up in Syria. Assad’s troops had abandoned most of
> Eastern Syria to focus on defending the Alawite heartland along the coast.
> That vacuum created an opportunity for lots of people: The Syrian Kurds, who
> occupied a tier along the Turkish border in the northeast; dozens of local
> mafia/resistance groups, who mobilized to profit from the wide-open borders;
> and the nucleus of ISIS, who saw a chance to set up a little emirate in this
> new no-man’s-land in the wastelands of eastern Syria, along the borders with
> Anbar.

> That’s the key here: ISIS is a physics demonstration in guerrilla form. It
> began as a Jordanian insurgent group. Jordan was too tough to crack, and the
> group was under deadly strain until Bush and Cheney gave it new life with
> the 2003 invasion. It moved into Iraq, first to the north, in Kurdistan, and
> then, as the pressure grew up there, to the south and west, landing in
> Anbar. And when a new low-pressure system opened up to the west in Syria,
> ISIS flowed into it like a rain cloud—right along a natural pathway, the
> Euphrates River, which flows eastward into Anbar from Syria.

~~~
bdevine
Thanks for posting this. A great read and I'm now following the author on
Twitter.

