generalspeaking

 Startling, Stale Revelations

"The report, due to be published on Monday, says the greatest danger to the international community are groups who share the IS ideology but are currently being ignored - they number about 100,000 fighters.
"Current Western efforts to define 'moderate' and 'extremist' rebels are bound to fail, because the groups themselves rarely make the distinction, the centre says.
"Some 60% of Syria's major rebel groups are Islamist extremists, and many of the groups share the same aims, the study finds.
"Fewer than a quarter of the rebels surveyed were not ideological, and many were willing to fight alongside extremists and would probably accept an Islamist political settlement to the civil war." BBC report on hard line jihad study

So much for moderate Syrian rebels fighting the insanely 'secular' regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's Baathist ideology that in its Alawite Shiite focus has demonstrably victimized the majority of Syrians who are sectarian Sunni in their Islamic devotion. Of course the reality is that once Assad began his demonic work of bashing the hell out of his Sunni subjects for their civic insubordination, Syria became an irresistible draw for Sunni jihadi militias who weren't too busy elsewhere at the time.

They flocked in their numbers, well armed, thanks to Libya's tribal-led disintegration and the distribution of arms depots freely available to enterprising Islamists who saw fit to use them elsewhere, like Mali for example, and Nigeria. And in Syria they found a situation well to their liking, with a government that had created a situation of such devastating carnage that it was left open and free for the jihadis to operate with impunity.

Thus formalizing Bashar al-Assad's characterization of his Sunni Syrian rebellious subjects as terrorists and scum. Among the jihadi groups that arrived in Syria to oppose the Syrian Sunni rebel militias and make the Syrian population even more miserable were al-Qaeda-linked groups like the Nusra Front, and the Iraqi group that would be censured by al-Qaeda for its brutality, reinventing itself as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Al Nusra Front Fighters : Photo Reuters

Whose poisonous penchant for shock and awe, repelled the international community through its pride in committing atrocities against the helpless, while awing recruits from across Africa and Europe by the quality of its uncompromising Islamist credentials. Islam has become infested with the infectious slime of butchery where no inhumane acts qualify as too extreme for video showmanship.

Within the black undercurrent of Islamist warfare where the House of Peace plots to spring surprises on the House of War, a confounding reversal of reality, painting Islam as inherently peaceful, struggling against the evil of Islamophobia emanating from the West, the onus is on non-Muslim states to surrender to Islam or pay the bloody consequences in feral onslaughts.

"ISIL represents a continuation of a way of thinking that started before it existed and will carry on if it is defeated. The West risks making a strategic failure by focusing only on ISIL."
"Defeating it militarily will not end global jihadism. We cannot bomb an ideology, but our war is ideological."
"If only ISIL is defeated, there is a high risk that dispersed ISIL fighters and other Salafi-jihadi groups will expand their horizons and launch attacks outside of Syria."
Centre on Religion and Geopolitics study

There it is, no surprise of stupendous proportions. That, in essence it is not only the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant that is infested with the disease of fanatical totalitarian Islamism, but an estimated 65,000 'fighters' who are part of rebel militias in Syria, separate and apart from those within ISIL. Defeat ISIL and like the fabled Greek monsters of yore, they will still rise up in their gory hordes to inflict death and destruction on the world.

It is a movement, a religious-political ideology of conquest that speaks to the tribal conflict-and-vengeance-seeking mentality of desert Bedouin genetically wired to wage war and to inflict themselves as victors upon all those incapable of fending for themselves and denying them their conquest. The study points out that up to 60 percent of all rebels are invested with an Islamist agenda.

And of those over half embrace Salafi-jihadism, the very core of Saudi-spread Wahhabism that forms the hard line ideology of ISIL's self-perpetuating drive toward a universal caliphate. Aside from ISIL itself, points out the report, fifteen Islamist groups harbour jihadist values, including Jabhat al-Nusra, Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam, and Ahrar al-Sham.

In the classic instance of the glass half full, the study concluded that support of democracy as a governing system for Syria is upheld by a larger number than those who champion an Islamic state. They have mobilized themselves, and they do represent the bulk of Syria's Sunni rebels, but their agenda has been submerged by the viral presence of the Islamists who receive greater notice because of the quality of their butchery not the quality of their democratic vision.

So does this latest study reveal anything not before concluded? Here is the result of a study published two years earlier:

A new study by Britain's IHS Janes defense and intelligence analysis agency confirms what many in the Intelligence community already believed: 50 percent of Syrian rebel forces are Islamist extremists.

The report estimates that 30,000 to 35,000 rebel fighters are hardline jihadists, 10,000 are affiliated with al Qaeda and around 30,000 belong to groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. The remaining are non-Islamic freedom fighters.

According to the study, up to 1,000 different groups are represented among the rebel forces.

Labels: Conflict, Islamic State, Islamism

posted by Pieface @ Monday, December 21, 2015