Soldato
- Joined
- 3 Jun 2005
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You'd think that the vehicles and men it takes to assault a city would be easy pickings for airstrikes as soon as they leave the civvie arae they're hiding in.
ISIS and Islamic militants - discussion
- Thread starter robfosters
- Start date
We would run out of bombs before you took every one of them. Also, it's not really quite so simple as flying squadrons of jets over there and bombing relentlessly. It takes time to target develop, identify and then aquire approvals. As all conflicts now, it's not lines of mechanised divisions rolling across from the mother land. It's groups like bandits or gangs, and when they're not in built up civilian areas they are hiding and moving quite cleverly, using tunnel networks for example. You also have the problem that some local civilians have acquired their own weapons and hardware to fight back, so naturally it's almost impossible to differentiate them. How do you know you're bombing the "bad guys"?
given they have captured land on par with the size of the UK I don't think one or two are going to cut it
Raqqa turned into a dust bowl would be a start
Yeah some pretty big Shia concentration of civilians/militia around Baghdad but still, more than 30,000 strong army forces on the run from approx. 2000 IS fighters doesn't exactly inspire much confidence. Not sure they are in a position really to siege Baghdad but with recent advances not impossible - but if they did I think it would fracture from the inside and get very messy.
All I know is there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that we aren't being told about, and that we're better off staying out of it. I wouldn't bet against the Islamic State taking Baghdad and hope that the many non-muslim foreigners living and working there get out OK.
I think 1 issues regarding the routing of the army is the war doctrine of IS (which is working)
we take no prisoners.
so if the army fighting surrenders , they will die anyway , by the hundred or more, so `he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day`.
we take no prisoners.
so if the army fighting surrenders , they will die anyway , by the hundred or more, so `he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day`.
There's always what-ifs; what if Bradley Manning hadn't released all those documents to wikileaks and inadvertedly started the Arab Spring? What if Britain had lost WW1? etc.
Not deliberately, but it's widely recognised that the confidential diplomatic cables that Manning leaked via wikileaks did play a significant role in fuelling local arab anger prior to and during the arab spring
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/wikihistory-did-leaks-inspire-arab-spring
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/13/amnesty-international-wikileaks-arab-spring (nice going Amnesty lol, there are far fewer human rights abuses thanks to those you now hail)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia...ey-manning-testifies-cablegate_b_2215387.html
I don't see it personally, perhaps a few clerics thought it would be good propoganda, but the rest of the arabian/muslim world, which already hated the west regardless would still have erupted in this dust-up.
That's what happens when you dissolve a proper army that's had a proper infrastructure and replace it with a bunch of useless sectarian goons that have no loyalty to the country to begin with
and to put that in to perspective Louisiana is slightly bigger than the UK and one of the smaller states of america