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Related: About this forumIsis, a year of the caliphate: Have US tactics only helped to make Islamists more powerful?
On 29 June, the first day of Ramadan in 2014, the leaders of a Sunni army operating on the Syria-Iraq border proclaimed an Islamic State under the rule of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, its new caliph. For many, this was the first we had heard of Isis, or Isil; but its forces, fanaticism and cruelty were to become all too familiar over the next 12 months and show no signs yet of diminishing. Patrick Cockburn looks at its military recordPatrick Cockburn
Friday 26 June 2015
The Islamic State is stronger than it was when it was first proclaimed on 29 June last year, shortly after Isis fighters captured much of northern and western Iraq. Its ability to go on winning victories was confirmed on 17 May this year in Iraq, when it seized Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and again four days later in Syria, when it took Palmyra, one of the most famous cities of antiquity and at the centre of modern transport routes.
The twin victories show how Isis has grown in strength: it can now simultaneously attack on multiple fronts, hundreds of miles apart, a capacity it did not have a year ago. In swift succession, its forces defeated the Iraqi and Syrian armies and, equally telling, neither army was able to respond with an effective counter-attack.
Supposedly these successes, achieved by Isis during its summer offensive in 2014, should no longer be feasible in the face of air strikes by the US-led coalition. These began last August in Iraq and were extended to Syria in October, with US officials recently claiming that 4,000 air strikes had killed 10,000 Isis fighters. Certainly, the air campaign has inflicted heavy losses on Isis, but it has made up for these casualties by conscripting recruits within the self-declared caliphate, an area the size of Great Britain with a population of five or six million.
in full: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-a-year-of-the-caliphate-have-us-tactics-played-into-islamist-hands-10345905.html
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Isis, a year of the caliphate: Have US tactics only helped to make Islamists more powerful? (Original Post)
Jefferson23
Jun 2015
OP
You don't want to wipe ISIS out too soon...same as we didn't want to get OBL in 2001-2002.
TwilightGardener
Jun 2015
#1
TwilightGardener
(46,416 posts)1. You don't want to wipe ISIS out too soon...same as we didn't want to get OBL in 2001-2002.
Where's the gain/$$ in that? Nope, stand back and watch (and pretty much withhold air power), while Ramadi falls, and then blame Iraqi soldiers, and then slowly add some more US forces, maybe build some "lily pads", etc. That's how you do it, sillies.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)2. Probably about right.
You notice that unlike my happy fantasy, the Kurds did not try to do much about Raqqa.
Erdogan does seem to be freaking out as it is, too.
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)3. What is there to say, the whole mess is jaw dropping.
**In other words, whatever the Pentagon thought was happening on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria was wrong. As in Korea in 1950 and South Vietnam in 1968, an enemy that the US military was convinced was on the run had suddenly struck back with devastating impact.