End of the Islamic State?

Nowadays, the whole world is very much focused on the militant radical Islamic organization called the Islamic state; tracking the growth of the organization, the source of funding, their immediate and also long term goals, group movements, their supporters, the key players (internal and external to the organization) and the fights against them.

Many of the arm-chair supporters of the Islamic state on social media have gone quietly in recent times; perhaps some have lost interest after realizing that the much-hyped concept of a glorified worldwide ‘caliphate’ may not materialize in their lifetimes.

I’m reading this article about the demise of the Islamic State.

Suddenly, Islamic State just can’t fall fast enough. All summer, the press has been saying IS will soon be accepting the keys to every city on earth, an unstoppable jihadi juggernaut.

And now, after six weeks stalled out against a local militia in Kobane and going exactly nowhere in the over-hyped drive on Baghdad, even the mainstream press, represented by America’s paper of record, the New York Times, is saying what I said months ago: IS is just a Sunni Arab militia that will never take serious turf from the other powerful groups in the region, the Kurds of the north or the Shia of the south.

After being shown up in Kobane, IS has now been truly humiliated by US airstrikes that hit a meeting on the Syria/Iraq border and a big convoy near Mosu

Even without nonstop decimation via air attack, a universal caliphate is a doomed, dumb idea. Remember what Al Baghdadi said: “Syria does not belong to the Syrians, and Iraq does not belong to the Iraqis”? You know who would beg to differ? The Syrians. And the Iraqis. And it’s not even that simple, because the territories in which this war is being fought are fractal as sci-fi dream scenes, which means that “Syrians” devolves into dozens, maybe hundreds, of groups that hate each other and will fight to the death for their local turf. Kobane is a part of one turf, “Rojava” or Syrian Kurdistan; but it’s also a local turf on its own, and you can bet that the Kobane people have a few stereotypes of their Kurdish neighbors in the other evolving cantons like Afrin. You can bet that not all of Assad’s Alawites are fond of each other, either, even if they’re forced to stick together now against the Sunni who want to annihilate them. And those Sunni have never managed to make common cause for any length of time, even against a common enemy.

The rest of the article is also equally interesting, so please consider reading all.

Another related article is this" Study: Westerners join Islamic State because of peer pressure, not social media "

Today, the Guardian reports on an upcoming study from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Science (ICSR) which finds that British Muslims who join Islamic State fighters in Syria do so more often because of peer pressure than social media propaganda.

“While online recruitment plays a role, people go because they know people who are in Syria,” ICSR director Peter Neumann told the Guardian. “It’s all about networks in the real world.”

References

http://pando.com/2014/11/10/the-war-nerd-farewell-islamic-state-we-hardly-knew-ye/
http://pando.com/2014/11/06/study-westerners-join-islamic-state-because-of-peer-pressure-not-social-media/