Is America on the ISIS Hit List?

Is America on the ISIS Hit List?

09/30/14

Graham Allison

Security, United States

"To whom does ISIS pose the most imminent and even existential threat?"  

ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his organization are unusual among terrorists in their explicit articulation of their ambitions, their agenda, their priorities, and their strategy. Analyzing their actions, one finds a high level of alignment between what they say and what they do.

Their self-proclaimed mission is to create an Islamic State, one governed according to their extreme and perverted interpretation of Islam. To achieve that objective, they organize fighters prepared to strike with vividly brutal strokes that are aimed at terrifying and intimidating their adversaries. After more than three years of civil war in Syria between the Assad government and an array of opponents, including the American-assisted Free-Syrian Army and Al Qaeda’s affiliate Al Nusra, ISIS has emerged as the most successful in establishing control of territory. From that base it has pushed into adjacent Iraq where it now controls a large swath of the northwest.

To those who come to its battlefield to thwart its ambitions, ISIS promises death, in the most brutal fashion. The ISIS-crafted statements by the American and British hostages who were beheaded could not be more explicit. Unlike Osama bin Laden’s fixation with what he called the “far enemy,” for ISIS the US is far away and well down on its hit list.

To whom does ISIS pose the most imminent and even existential threat?

- Assad’s Syrian government (from whom it has seized more than one-third of its country and seeks the rest).

- Iraq’s Baghdad government (from whom it has seized a quarter of its territory and aspires to more).

- Iraq’s Kurds (from whom it seized parts of Kurdistan until it was forced to retreat by a combination of US air strikes and Kurdish peshmerga boots on the ground).

- Iran (as the leader of Islamic Shia whom Sunni ISIS regards as apostates who must be converted or killed).

- Lebanon (where Iranian-affiliated Hezbollah militias have noticed and are fighting back).

- Jordan (fragile and fearful as always).

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-the-isis-hit-list-11372