U2Edge
Gold Member
- Sep 15, 2012
- 5,273
- 1,199
ISIS, The Islamic State Of Iraq and Syria, also now just known as the Islamic State, during the second week of June 2014, managed to take over much of 3 Sunni majority provinces(Ninawa, Al-Anbar, Salah Hadin) in Iraq and took some parts of two other provinces(Kirkuk, Diyala). In doing so, they seized two major cities, provincial capitals, Mosul and Tikrit. They were able to seize vast amounts of weapons from the Iraqi military in the north which surprisingly collapsed quickly, due to panic, mis-communication, and poor leadership.
ISIS in a matter of a few weeks has grown from a terrorist organization primarily based in Syria and in competition with other opposition groups in Syria, to one that has more than tripled the area it controls, and has control of much of Syria from Allepo all the way to Tikrit, and Fallujah in Iraq.
The leader of ISIS, Abu Bakur Al Baghdadi is now said to be worth over $2 BILLION dollars with all of the banks that have been robbed and the assets that have been seized in major cities. ISIS is now in control of some large oil producing areas that combined have a daily output of over 100,000 Barrels of oil a day.
ISIS has large amounts of money, land, and people under its control. This is not Afghanistan or Somalia where the people were poor and non-arab. This area is Arab with connections to the entire middle east. There are large modern cities in this area, as well as natural resources that Afghanistan, Somalia or even Yemen did not have at this level.
Money, land, natural resources, and people equals power. ISIS has thousands of recruited foreign nationals from western countries making it easier to plan and execute terrorist attacks in the west.
If ISIS is able to use its money, power, and global terrorist connections, there is the threat, the nightmare, that they could at some point build or obtain a nuclear device and detonate it in a Western city causing the worst loss of life in history from a single bombing event. I'm concerned that the vast resources that ISIS has obtained over the past month suddenly make this a much more probable scenario than it has been in the past.
Despite the above, the response from the United States and countries in the region has been slow and lacking in urgency. While I hope that the threat of ISIS is overblown and perhaps it could crack like a house of cards because it has overextended itself too quickly, the world still deserves a quick and prudent response to this growing threat, but at the moment this is not happening.
ISIS in a matter of a few weeks has grown from a terrorist organization primarily based in Syria and in competition with other opposition groups in Syria, to one that has more than tripled the area it controls, and has control of much of Syria from Allepo all the way to Tikrit, and Fallujah in Iraq.
The leader of ISIS, Abu Bakur Al Baghdadi is now said to be worth over $2 BILLION dollars with all of the banks that have been robbed and the assets that have been seized in major cities. ISIS is now in control of some large oil producing areas that combined have a daily output of over 100,000 Barrels of oil a day.
ISIS has large amounts of money, land, and people under its control. This is not Afghanistan or Somalia where the people were poor and non-arab. This area is Arab with connections to the entire middle east. There are large modern cities in this area, as well as natural resources that Afghanistan, Somalia or even Yemen did not have at this level.
Money, land, natural resources, and people equals power. ISIS has thousands of recruited foreign nationals from western countries making it easier to plan and execute terrorist attacks in the west.
If ISIS is able to use its money, power, and global terrorist connections, there is the threat, the nightmare, that they could at some point build or obtain a nuclear device and detonate it in a Western city causing the worst loss of life in history from a single bombing event. I'm concerned that the vast resources that ISIS has obtained over the past month suddenly make this a much more probable scenario than it has been in the past.
Despite the above, the response from the United States and countries in the region has been slow and lacking in urgency. While I hope that the threat of ISIS is overblown and perhaps it could crack like a house of cards because it has overextended itself too quickly, the world still deserves a quick and prudent response to this growing threat, but at the moment this is not happening.
