Iraq: Out of the desert into Mosul (closed)

[ganulv]

Will non-Western Christians evolve into a political force if they feel threatened by growing Jihadism in the Sahel? Time will tell - but they are more likely to see confrontation with Islam as medieval struggle (ala Charles Martell) than Western academics.

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I know this might sound ludicrous in 2014 - but an all out religious war between Muslims & Christians could happen in a decade over large parts of Africa - that is why this IS threat has to be dealt with.

Organizing conflict around religious identity doesn’t sound ludicrous at all. And, yeah, there has been a growth over the past decade of those seeking to reestablish the caliphate. But do you seriously think we’re about to see a transnational Crusades-type conflict in the next ten years? How would any attempt to make that happen not get splintered by nationalist and/or more local and/or ethnic identity issues?

I’m not saying that the members of the self-proclaimed Islamic State are not murderous bastards or anything, but even calling them the IS is giving them too much political credit. They need to be taken dead seriously, but there’s a certain Yellow Peril reactionaryism to a lot of the chatter about them.