... The elimination of its leader will pose difficulties to its operations in Syria and Iraq, where they were already significantly weakened, but does not necessarily limit the capabilities of other members or affiliated cells. The territorial control of ISIS had already been severely limited in Syria and Iraq before al-Baghdadi’s killing and the threat had diminished as a consequence of the end of the territorial caliphate. The threat of ISIS, however, is not only limited to its territorial control, but even more so to its ideological component, which ...
... ISIS is tensing and progressing. A crack between Baghdad and Erbil would badly alter the progress made in the fight against ISIS. Moscow also careful about its good relations with Ankara and Tehran, especially in terms of the need for their full cooperation in ending the ongoing Syrian conflict. To conclude, even international powers are not in concrete support to the KRG move, and Barzani needs such support ... ... barely produces anything. In short, its highly dependent on trade with neighbouring countries. A blockade scenario by Turkey, Iraq and Iran on the KRG would be a nightmare for Barzani. Plus, the region is not mature enough in terms of administrative regulations ...
... and came to be the most prominent rebel group in Syria over the course of 2013, coming to control large amounts of Syrian territory and growing dramatically in size and power; it was this year when the group began calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Baghdadi increasingly clashed with al-Qaeda’s leadership over tactics and aims, leading to a formal split between the two groups in early in 2014; just a few months later, ISIS would use its power base in Syria to launch a major invasion ...
... so much more than just Syria when you throw the age-old Sunni-Shiite sectarian rivalries into the mix, which have been red-hot since the Lebanese Civil War, continuing through the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, through the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and now through conflict in Yemen and Syria.
Recruits are coming from all over the world—even young girls from the West—to join ISIS in Syria (some 30,000 over the past few years, according to a recent major report). Some of the older people involved in this will have been veterans of the conflicts in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Iraq. All of those conflicts lasted about a decade; ...
... so many other conflicts that it has metastasized into one big megaconflict. Syria’s neighbors, as I predicted in the fall of 2013, are also suffering from an increasingly destabilizing burden as a result of the conflict—none more so than Iraq as ISIS broke off from al-Qaeda and proceeded to shock the world with its march from Syria into Iraq in 2014—and the more than four million registered refugees it has produced.
UNHCR
Still, as mentioned, even before the chemical weapons attacks, the Obama Administration had signaled and had taken steps—albeit very miniscule ...
... immunity. Nothing to complain about here, and I agree that a residual force would have been better but that is 100% on Maliki not granting immunity and having already committed to his Iranian allies that he would see our troops out in 2011. We will come to ISIS (and Obama’s mild military reengagement in Iraq) and Syria as separate issues.
Israeli/Palestinian Peace
Here, one may be tempted to make more of the efforts of the Obama Administration than they actually represent, but at the same time we should not minimize them.
To be sure, Obama has publicly ...
... strong cases to be made on Iraq confronting Obama: one for intervention, one against intervention, with the Administration considering both.
In the for column, the former al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia groups calling themselves first the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/the Levant/al-Sham (ISIS or ISIL) and now just Islamic State (IS) might possibly have been the worst, most brutal, most powerful terrorist organization in the history of the world at that point. The group now controlled huge swaths of Syria and had taken over huge swaths ...
... military spending.
One reason to be optimistic about addressing the IS problem is that there is a 'coaltion of the unwilling' which is nonetheless appearing more assertive than its more 'willing' counterpart back to 2003 in Iraq. No wonder since the threat for other states in the region is formidable. On the other side, the new Iraqi government shall be one of the major pieces of the puzzle since it has to become a better alternative for Iraqi Sunnites. Concentrating power ...
Dr. Glen Segell
(Fellow – The Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies,University of Haifa, Israel)
The Southern flank of Europe is the Mediterranean Sea. It is a small sea and many countries rely on the freedom of both sea and air traffic for their economy. On the one hand there was optimism that the Arab Spring would bring greater freedom for the individual in countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. There was further optimism that the North African countries of Tunisia...
By Zhyldyz Oskonbaeva (RIEAS Senior Advisor & Eurasian Liaison)
On a number of levels, the situation between the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the ethnic Kurds of Syria, Iraq and Turkey is creating a power shift that no one is discussing. In this article, I will explain why: 1) The Kurds have an unprecedented opportunity to achieve a political homeland; 2) Tehran's strategy ...
