Everyone is 'fighting Islamic State' – and they’re all lying

[bemildred]

---

And what are they fighting? Islamic State is a terrifying organization – if you are an Iraqi or Syrian civilian, or a minority Yezidi or Christian, whose communities have been murdered en masse. But setting aside its propaganda, rape of women and murder of civilians, IS was estimated to only have 31,000 fighters at the height of its offensive in September of 2015. The number of people living under IS control in Syria is estimated at around two million, although some have fled. That includes people in the province of Aleppo, Hasakah, Raqqa and the areas around Deir as-Zor. Bolstered by 20,000 foreign volunteer fighters, IS can only draw on 200,000 men of fighting age for recruitment and logistics. In Iraq it has a few more resources. But it is stretched thin in both Iraq and Syria, fighting Shi’ite militias, Iran and the Kurds of the YPG in Syria and Peshmerga in Iraq. The Kurds alone field fighting forces that are larger than IS and have defeated IS in battle. So if the Kurds, by themselves, with truck-mounted .50 caliber guns and AK-47s can defeat IS, why can’t the 62-country “anti-IS coalition”? How is it possible that the countries who fought on both sides of WWII in Europe can’t defeat 40,000 men armed with mortars and riding around in Toyota trucks? IS doesn’t have an air force. It doesn’t have air defenses.

It doesn’t have tanks. It improvises armored vehicles by welding plates to civilian cars, and by capturing Humvees from the Iraqi army. With no way to service the captured equipment, much of it falls apart eventually. If you resurrected just one division of Patton’s Third Army from 1944, it could defeat IS. So why is IS still growing in power in Syria, still fighting? Because the 62-nation coalition and all its friends in Ankara and Moscow are not really fighting IS.

We live in an era of fabrications, bombastic statements, bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo and nonsense, where paying lip service to “fighting” is always preferable to actually fighting. One foreign volunteer who served with the Kurds actually fighting IS wrote on Facebook yesterday: “Surprise, surprise, ‘fighting terrorism’ is a good excuse to kill whoever you don’t like these days.”

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Everyone-is-fighting-Islamic-State-and-theyre-all-lying-419860

[LiberalArkie]

1. Thank You. Very interesting article.

[bemildred]

2. +1.

There is a certain irony in it appearing in JPost, but it's right on, it is.

[leveymg]

3. Nobody dares offend the Oil King.

Except, maybe, the Oil Czar. The rest of the world are vassal servants to the two.

This situation would have been intolerable to the men of the Third Army. Maybe, it's time to resurrect them.

[GoneFishin]

4. They need an excuse to meddle anywhere there are resources to steal for western corporations.

It could be that ISIS is totally real, exaggerated, fabricated, fictitious, or actually created or aided by them.

I don't know. But I do know that if there are resources or power hubs that the west or it's "democratic" allies in the middle east want then they will find some excuse to shed U.S. blood and treasure to appropriate those things. Of course, even if the bounty is phenomenally plentiful the U.S. taxpayers never benefit, it all goes to corporations who mostly pay little or no taxes.

[atreides1]

5. It doesn’t have tanks

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/05/20/isis-captures-hundreds-of-us-vehicles-and-tanks-in-ramadi-from-i.html