Beyond the frontline: watching ISIS

[Bill Moore]

An insightful Frontline special on the Islamic State in Afghanistan. They filmed and interviewed an IS member training Afghan children. The virus continues to spread.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...n-afghanistan/

ISIS in Afghanistan

17 NOV 15

[davidbfpo]

Via Kings of War the author, Jill Sergeant asks a hard question:

how the various parties – local, regional, and global – will move forward when the war machine is defeated.....can we imagine any space for humanity for Iraq’s lost generation swept along by the currents of an abhorrent promise?

Link:http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2015/11/ccl...iers-of-isis/?

A recent article from The Nation is cited:

What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters (sub-titled)They’re drawn to the movement for reasons that have little to do with belief in extremist Islam.

Link:http://www.thenation.com/article/wha...sis-prisoners/

For economy of effort this is the key passage:

 These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.