What would Turkey have to gain by taking out IS and leaving a weak Assad government in Syria? IS may be the big threat that is is due to Saddam's ex-military personnel occupying top ranks in the organization. It may explain why a group of religious zealots have become such deft military tacticians. Perhaps the MSM has put this revelation on the backburner in favor of the ever relevant "Muslim extremists" tag. So what would happen if the Muslim extremists are defeated but not the ex-Baathists?
Yup, I think the real force behind ISIL is a Sunni (Baathist) desire to control oil revenues and they are using religious zealotry as a recruiting tool. -all wars are economic- If Turkey just stays within their borders I don't think they will face any direct military confrontations because no one wants to get in a fight with a NATO country. Where is the American equipped, Iranian backed Iraqi army? Why aren't they engaging 40 miles from Baghdad?
Well, all wars have an economic component to them but I don't believe that every war is solely about economics. This is a war with a very large religious component to it whether we like it or not. Erdogan of Turkey would choose to annihilate the Kurds as a whole along with the Shiite-backed Assad regime before he ever did anything about his fellow Sunnis in ISIS. Erdogan's end goal is to reestablish the Ottoman Caliphate.
Please explain the economic logic behind the First World War. *awaits ranting about arms companies or some other baloney*
Never heard the one about an arms company but certainly the discussion of the b2b rr gets brought up in every university history course at some point.
Empires are all about transferring wealth back to the home folks by the projection of military power. Here's a short read: http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.n...of_World_W/oil_and_the_origins_of_world_w.HTM
It was a common historical myth believed by Americans in between the wars that evil arms financiers had tricked the US into joining what was essentially a pointless conflict, and became so pervasive that Congress even held an investigation into it. Though I will admit that I have no idea what "rr" means. As for Dubious's article: it proves absolutely nothing, and ironically for an article which is clearly purporting to move things away from Europe, actually talks about nothing but Europe - or rather, the wrong part of Europe. There are two problems: First, the link between these imperialist squabblings and the road to war is tenuous. Every amateur historian knows that there was a growing tension between a rising Germany and a declining Britain. So? That's not the same as saying "all wars are about economics". I mean, you could claim that it was about tensions between a rising economic power and a declining economic power, but that's so vague as to be meaningless. Yes, a good chunk of wars are between a rising power and a declining power. Since power is not a static thing, that's thus always going to be true and is thus just a tautology. But the second one is the real problem: it comes with this idea that the First World War was a conflict between Germany and Britain. This is ridiculous. Britain dragged its feet on joining the war and its financiers were actually virulently opposed to joining the war ( The Economist republished an article it wrote in 1914 as part of its 100th anniversary of the outbreak - and it argued in that article that Britain should stay out of the war and be a mediator for the small European countries). It was France and Russia who bore the brunt of the alliance against Germany - and your article doesn't talk a whole lot about them, and crucially gives no agency to them whatsoever, having them react to actions of Britain. An article which you claim purports to explain the cause of the First World War that talks this little about Russia is only slightly less ridiculous than not talking about the Soviet Union in regards to the Second.
Wasn't one of them pregnant? And I'm pretty sure both are married to jihadists? Like Kojirou said............too bad for them. Yikes.
Ahh Turkey, another US ally due to basically no other reason than "we are anti-communist or have oil" with a long laundry list of human rights violations, suppression of ethnic minorities and foreign aggressions (Cyprus anyone?) Also don't forget Qatar, the same government that's secretly buying weapons from Sudan army's inventory (mainly of Chinese origin) and smuggling them to the Syrian resistance including the crazies. You can thank Qatar for that fact that the crazy radicals now have modern MANPADs and and anti tank missiles.
Australia will not let these girls back in even if they somehow happen to break free from ISIS. They will forever be raped and mistreated, then discarded like a piece of trash. So sad.
http://www.economist.com/news/middl...elling-captive-women-concubines-have-and-hold Slavery in Islam To have and to hold Jihadists boast of selling captive women as concubines Doing it by the book THE holy book is clear about what to do when you capture a city: “Put to the sword all the men in it”. As for the women and children, “You may take these as plunder for yourselves.” This is pretty much the advice that the fighters of Islamic State (IS) seem to have followed in the Sinjar area of northern Iraq, peopled largely by members of the Yazidi faith, that the jihadists seized last month. Reports by the UN and independent human-rights groups suggest that the invaders executed hundreds of Yazidi men and kidnapped as many as 2,000 women and children. Any doubt as to the fate of these captives was dispelled by the latest issue of IS’s glossy English-language online magazine, Dabiq. An article titled “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour” details religious justifications for reintroducing a practice that ended in all but a few Muslim countries more than a century ago. It claims not only that the Koran, the sayings of the prophet and traditional Islamic law all endorse the enslavement of infidel women captured in wartime, but that the abandonment of this right has caused sin to spread; men are easily tempted to debauchery when denied this “legal” alternative to marriage. Better yet, the article grimly enthuses, the prophet himself foretold that one of the signs of the Hour—the end of the world—was when “the slave girl gives birth to her master.” This obviously means that concubines are needed to breed soldiers for jihad. Therefore, explains the writer, the victorious warriors of Sinjar divided the Yazidi women and children among themselves, “after one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic State’s authority as khums”, ie, the share of booty surrendered to early Muslim commanders. The fastidious theologians of IS are right in some respects. Technically speaking, the syncretic Yazidi faith may be regarded by Islam as heathen, denying its adherents the protections that Christians and Jews—fellow “people of the book”—should enjoy. And it is true, too, that Islamic scripture, although vague in many matters, is specific about slavery, including such questions as whether sex is permitted. In recent times Muslim rebels in Sudan as well as in Nigeria have used such arcane justifications to excuse enforced concubinage. Yet the fact is that, like members of most faiths, the vast majority of Muslims have pragmatic concerns about hyper-literal interpretations. Mainstream Muslim clerics, citing competing verses and traditions that praise the freeing of slaves as a virtuous act, often describe Islam’s abandonment of slavery as a sign of its adaptability to modern times. Besides, imagine if Christians and Jews still followed the letter of the Bible, which is, incidentally, the source of the passage at the top of this article. The verse (Deuteronomy 20:10-20) also prescribes that in case of capturing a city from the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites or Jebusites, the victors should “utterly destroy them” and “save alive nothing that breatheth”.
