Roach... that article tells it as it is. great find.
Here is another on their thinking. Time to wake up.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/worl ... 615744.ece
This is a credo based on punishment
If you want to strike at the sinful west, you pick a Friday night. While devout Muslims are fresh from prayer, young Parisian non-believers are knocking back the booze.
Islamic State killers made their point about the clash of civilisations: frustrated young men ready to blow up revellers of a similar age because they are seen as representatives of a corrupt society in terminal decline.
The Isis attack on Paris was not an act of weakness, a distraction from a few setbacks on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq. Rather it is a long-established, cool-headed urban guerrilla strategy grafted on to the sense of righteous anger that suffuses the jihadis returning to Europe from the Middle East wars.
It was a show of strength that will have enthused would-be jihadis in the suburbs of Paris and Brussels. A poll last year of French people aged between 18 and 24 showed that one in four has a favourable opinion of Isis. Only around 7.5 per cent of the French population is Muslim.
Massacres do perversely fuel recruitment but Isis is more than a death cult. Its credo is based on punishment. Every encroachment on its power attracts retribution. Thus Russia is punished for its air campaign by a bomb on a Russian passenger jet leaving Sharm el-Sheikh. Kurds are punished for closing a Turkish-Syrian border crossing used by Isis by the slaughter of civilians in Kobani.
Isis also has its own form of deterrence theory. If France had maintained its scepticism towards the US then it would not now be in Isis’ sights. The killing spree was an explicit punishment for François Hollande’s war against Isis in Syria.
It was an attempt to drive a wedge between a government ready to make war and voters who feel that Syria is not their war of choice.
When al-Qaeda bomb attacks killed almost 200 people in Madrid in 2004, popular disillusion with a US-led war prompted a change of government and the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. Isis is hoping for a similar effect in France.
It has gone beyond moral retribution and positioned itself as a player in French, perhaps European, politics. Do what we want, Isis is saying, and we won’t touch you.
Isis considers itself to be the servant of the Prophet Muhammad and yet it plays God. When it claimed responsibility for the Paris assault, it warned that “the smell of death won’t leave their [French] noses as long as they partake in their crusader campaign”.
Isis reinterprets every modern thinker about insurgent warfare to match its strategy. It gives itself momentum by sowing chaos across continents. It says it wants to destroy the “grey zone” of moderation and give Sunnis a black and white choice: either support us or be lumped with western unbelievers.
A key part of its strategy is borrowed from the leftist teachings that informed South American guerrillas and the West German Baader-Meinhof group of the 1970s, the “Strategy of Tension”. Provoke governments into taking repressive actions and then capitalise on the resulting sense of disgruntlement.
That is the war of the future, of the present. Campaigns against the Baader-Meinhof group lasted for decades. It looks, after Paris, as if the war against Isis could be in a similar category.
Military options
Increased airstrikes
They can support ground forces but not replace them. An expansion of airstrikes would increase pressure on Isis but risks collateral damage
Increased special forces
They could help co-ordinate an air campaign and strike with night raids at the leadership structures of Isis
Troops on the ground
Unlikely as it risks casualties
Grand coalition
Fighting with Russia alongside Sunni regional powers and President Assad. Working with Assad would be politically unacceptable though