ISIL, ISIS, Daesh discussion thread.

jmc007 said:
Is it not an old adage that to get the truth you need to hear both sides of a story?


The game is afoot.
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You make the naive assumption that at least one 'side' always tells the truth.

Cite more social media as source though. It's very informative.
 
Rroff said:
^^ In this case Russia wins, until it doesn't, as they have the port facilities, etc. there.
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Which is why they are so desperate to hold on to Syria. The US has "taken" Afghanistan and Iraq, alongside alliances with a fair few others in the area (Saudi etc).
 
Amp34 said:
Well the reality is he shouldn't necessarily have said what he said initially. Most people knew that going into Syria would have been a cluster **** and we should be doing everything we should to stay out of it. That was the best compromise at the time, which is perhaps a positive for Obama in not pushing for full scale intervention - unlike Cameron.

If we had gone in very little would be different to now, still hundreds of thousands dead, still a fight between three/four factions, still a broken country and still terrorism rife, the only difference being there would have been thousands of US/UK soldiers dead as well, and we would have had to make the decision of spending another decade fighting in a country that has collapsed or just leaving it to it's fate like Libya, after we "liberated" it.

I still think we took the best option at the time, and I doubt things would have been that much better. Look at Libya for example, split in two, with an internationally recognised "government" that can't control a teapot, and another "government" that also lays claim to the country, all surrounded by terrorist groups now given free reign in most of the country and countries surrounding it (such as Mali - the French did a good job there, helping a sitting government deal with a rebel incursion, not dismantling a country and leaving it to go **** itself, which is what we did to Libya and to an extent Iraq).
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I think the deciding factor was the UK parliament voting against it rather than Obama not pushing for it - he was happy to go ahead with it but didn't want to act unilaterally once the UK voted against it then he backed down on his red line and got the compromise. I do agree it is messy and would be very risky for the West to get involved.
 
Apparently there were piles and piles of Howitzer rounds at the site of the gasing in Syria.
These rounds are generally used as IED's or they can be cut open and used as a vessel for a gas bomb.
People saying Assads bombs blew up the sarin at the site unwittingly, making it look like he bombed them with the gas.
 
Amp34 said:
Any reliable source for that?
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And therein lies the problem. We've had no formal investigation and US has just attacked a sovereign state. I'm no Assad fan but I have some issues with the way this has played out. Who's being the aggressor here?

There's a naive sense of "goodies vs baddies" on here. Both sides US or Russia are not in this for humanitarian reasons otherwise there's plenty of other human rights abuses and war crimes happening across the globe that they should be getting involved in.

Our Prime Minister has just visited the biggest exporter of terrorism to discuss arms sales. It's ok, we've had a polite word over some tea about their treatment of women. Doesn't matter because they are our allies.

How is this all relevant? It's some perspective. We've had comments about "Winning" (Hell Yeah!!!), why this war is definitely 'the one' to get involved in and evil Russia.
 
jmc007 said:
People saying Assads bombs blew up the sarin at the site unwittingly, making it look like he bombed them with the gas.
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This is Russian propaganda, nothing else, bombing Sarin stockpiles would not produce a chemical attack effect.
 
And the planes are flying again from the 'bombed' airfield some 24 hours later, so the point of the 50 odd cruise missiles was?
 
Mr Jack said:
This is Russian propaganda, nothing else, bombing Sarin stockpiles would not produce a chemical attack effect.
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Depends - stored stock of a biological or chemical weapon would normally be destroyed, especially with the use of certain types weapons like thermobarics. There is a risk though that a weaponised chemical weapon that was assembled in a warhead and mounted on a working rocket i.e. ready for use or delivery to a 3rd party could be launched by the burn off of a weapons stockpile resulting in the release of the agent nearby.
 
Orionaut said:
It wasn't as if there was much of a chemical weapon effect anyway.

A full on chemical attack would have killed thousands, not just a couple of dozen. (If that) :/
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Surely it depends how many people are in the range? It's not gonna kill 1000s if there are only a few there.
 
I would hope our intelligence services, and the Americans, would have known what the real situation was with regards to the ownership of the chemical weapons.

You wouldn't launch cruise missiles and potentially ignite Ww3, without near concrete proof of who used them.
 
Trusty said:
WW3 over Syria? I don't see it personally.
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I dunno the US seem to have been desperately trying to provoke Russia into conflict over the last few years without actually doing it directly, it is getting kind of sad actually - so far Russia has just sidestepped the provocation.

(My intention isn't to brush aside Russia acts of aggression here which is another story).
 
Im not sure who's provoking who but i just don't see full scale war breaking out over a small country like that. It makes no sense, why would we risk humanity over Syria..
 
Trump being the unpredictable president he is, I wouldn't rule anything out. If Russia were to encroach on Ukraine again, I would hope we wouldn't just stand back and watch it happen again.

Russia is just as hypocritical in all this as we are. Crimea anyone? Eastern Ukraine? Georgia? The difference being having good intentions but executed poorly, with the other side having nothing but poor intentions and executing perfectly.
 
Trusty said:
Im not sure who's provoking who but i just don't see full scale war breaking out over a small country like that. It makes no sense, why would we risk humanity over Syria..
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It's a lot bigger and a lot more significant than the tiny island of Cuba.
 
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