From Pat Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis:
“The US will wreck itself if it continues to fight these ruinously expensive wars against the jihadis. IMO the IS wants to build a salafist state across the Middl East and South Asia. To that end they must achieve control of the assets now possessed by Saudi Arabia.
Would IS welcome a chance to inflict as many casualties on the US as possible? Certainly they would but that would be a means to an end and not the end itself.”
“Ever since Syrian government forces withdrew from the Syrian Kurdish enclaves or cantons on the border with Turkey in July 2012, Ankara has feared the impact of self-governing Syrian Kurds on its own 15 million-strong Kurdish population.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would prefer Isis to control Kobani, not the PYD. When five PYD members, who had been fighting Isis at Kobani, were picked up by the Turkish army as they crossed the border last week they were denounced as “separatist terrorists”.
Turkey is demanding a high price from the US for its co-operation in attacking Isis, such as a Turkish-controlled buffer zone inside Syria where Syrian refugees are to live and anti-Assad rebels are to be trained. Mr Erdogan would like a no-fly zone which will also be directed against the government in Damascus since Isis has no air force. If implemented the plan would mean Turkey, backed by the US, would enter the Syrian civil war on the side of the rebels, though the anti-Assad forces are dominated by Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate.”
“Why doesn’t Ankara worry more about the collapse of the peace process with the PKK that has maintained a ceasefire since 2013? It may believe that the PKK is too heavily involved in fighting Isis in Syria that it cannot go back to war with the government in Turkey. On the other hand, if Turkey does join the civil war in Syria against Assad, a crucial ally of Iran, then Iranian leaders have said that “Turkey will pay a price”. This probably means that Iran will covertly support an armed Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. Saddam Hussein made a somewhat similar mistake to Mr Erdogan when he invaded Iran in 1980, thus leading Iran to reignite the Kurdish rebellion that Baghdad had crushed through an agreement with the Shah in 1975. Turkish military intervention in Syria might not end the war there, but it may well spread the fighting to Turkey.”
These two articles describe how the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, brought to power in 1744 through a pact between Muhammed ibn Saud and Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab during the conquest of the Arabian peninsula, provides the philosophical basis for ISIS’ interpretation of Islam. This form of Islam
1. gave moral cover to the al-Sauds as they dealt harshly with the other Arabian tribes during their conquest.
2. allows almost any action by ISIS for the attainment of political means by providing an Islamic cover.
3. has made the al-Saud family somewhat captive to their own radicalized population.
4. forced the al-Saud family to focus Wahhabi energies outside the kingdom by financing radical Islamic schools all over the Muslim world and by supporting jihadist movements.
This small movement, though its views are anathema and foreign to a majority of Muslims, has had an outsized influence on the Muslim world through its partnership with the now oil-rich al-Saud family.
Is the current conflict in the Middle East the result of Western blunders, or part of a plan to create chaos in which different groups are divided, fight each other to exhaustion, and controlled? From Daniel Sanchez:
Who’s going to give baya to whom?
ISIS favors cleansing the Sunni population through violence, as well as fighting non-Sunnis, while al-Qaeda prefers to treat local populations less harshly, slowly ramping up their strict interpretation of sharia after consolidating gains.
In depth explanation of the split between the seemingly consanguine groups, from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:
The War Between ISIS and al-Qaeda for Supremacy of the Global Jihadist Movement