The Real Challenge When It Comes to Destroying the Islamic State

The Real Challenge When It Comes to Destroying the Islamic State

09/16/14

Rajan Menon

ISIS, Terrorism, Counterinsurgency, Iraq, United States

"It’s best to remember that strategy involves more than choices about which weapons are best and who should wield them."

The expert consensus on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has jelled with remarkable rapidity. The vast majority of commentators on this site and others like it concur that the movement is a major threat—not just to Iraq and Syria and their environs, but to the United States and its Western allies as well—and that something needs to be done. TNI’s Robert Merry, among the wisest and measured voices on international politics, recently called for destroying ISIS.

Once dismissed by President Obama as small beer, ISIS has turned out to be anything but, something the president conceded in his speech to the nation, delivered (not coincidentally) a day before the 13th anniversary (if one can call it that) of 9/11.

ISIS, which has undergone changes in name and mission over the years, originated about a decade ago as an Al Qaeda offshoot enmeshed in post-Saddam Iraq’s Sunni-Shi’a bloodletting. It is now a state within a state (or a “Caliphate”), complete with a “capital” in Raqqa, Syria. The movement controls, or is a formidable presence in, swaths of territory spanning Syria and Iraq.

Estimates of how just many people fight under ISIS’ black banner vary from 10,000 to 31,500; the latter is the CIA’s latest number. Among them are thousands of foreigners from as many as eighty countries, including Western ones. A Swiss government-funded study on the outflow to Syria’s battlefields of men from eleven Western countries used the word “unprecedented” to describe the trend in seven of those countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and Australia. Hence the fear that ISIS’ foreign fighters could come home and perpetuate massive acts of terror is not fanciful: some of them have threatened to do just that.

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-real-challenge-when-it-comes-destroying-the-islamic-11286