Islamic State

Salafi jihadist militant Sunni Islamist group
(Redirected from ISIL)

The Islamic State (IS; official name since June 2014), at times known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; /ˈsɪl/) or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS; /ˈsɪs/) and also referred to by its Arabic-language acronym Daesh (داعش), is an Islamist militant jihadist group and former unrecognized quasi-state that follows a Salafi jihadist doctrine based on the Sunni branch of Islam. It was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999 and gained global prominence in 2014, when it drove Iraqi security forces out of key cities during the Anbar campaign, which was followed by its capture of Mosul and the Sinjar massacre.

How can you say that they're "Islamic"? just because "they call themselves Islamic," why are you repeating it? if I call myself the president of USA, will you repeat that... ~ Zakir Naik

ISIL originated in 1999, pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda, and participated in the Iraqi insurgency following the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a multi-national coalition led by the United States. In June 2014, the group proclaimed itself to be a worldwide caliphate and began referring to itself as the Islamic State (الدولة الإسلامية).

Quotes by IS membersEdit

 
Do not think the war that we are waging is the Islamic State’s war alone. Rather, it is the Muslims’ war altogether. It is the war of every Muslim in every place, and the Islamic State is merely the spearhead in this war. It is but the war of the people of faith against the people of disbelief. ~ Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
Sorted alphabetically by author or source
  • If you see that I am wrong, advise me and put me on the right track, and obey me as long as I obey God in you... God gave your mujahedeen brothers victory after long years of jihad and patience... so they declared the caliphate and placed the caliph in charge. This is a duty on Muslims that has been lost for centuries.
  • Thus, he is the imam and khalīfah for the Muslims everywhere.  Accordingly, the "Iraq and Shām" in the name of the Islamic State is henceforth removed from all official deliberations and communications, and the official name is the Islamic State from the date of this declaration.
  • Upon conquering the region of Sinjar in Wilāyat Nīnawā, the Islamic State faced a population of Yazidis, a pagan minority existent for ages in regions of Iraq and Shām. Their continual existence to this day is a matter that Muslims should question as they will be asked about it on Judgement Day.
    • Islamic State propaganda, quoted in Cheterian, Vicken (2019). "ISIS genocide against the Yazidis and mass violence in the Middle East". British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies: 1–13. DOI:10.1080/13530194.2019.1683718.

Quotes about ISEdit

 
Last night, the United States brought the world’s number one terrorist leader to justice. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead. He was the founder and leader of ISIS, the most ruthless and violent terror organization anywhere in the world. ~ Donald Trump
 
The US has been using ISIS as a pretext for its own completely illegal occupation of the entire northeast third of Syrian lands, and has often been helping or working directly on behalf of the al Qaeda affiliate and similar terrorist groups. ~ Janice Kortkamp
Sorted alphabetically by author or source
 
Our faith, like yours, commands mercy, peace and tolerance. … Those outlaws of Islam who deny these truths are vastly outnumbered by the ocean of believers — 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide. ~ Abdullah of Jordan
 
This evil death cult is neither a true representation of Islam not is it a state. ~ David Cameron
 
The sources of the Islamic State (IS) ideology and other al-Qaeda affiliate groups are the Wahabbi that has been supported by the royal family in Saudi Arabia ~ Bashar al-Assad
 
I think we can probably say with some confidence that if an evangelical Christian group threw gays off towers in the Deep South, gay media outlets would currently be lambasting the Christian churches for a history of homophobia which had led to this pass. There would be demands for every prominent and obscure Christian pastor to condemn this brutal act. And they would. If a group of group of deeply extrovert Jews did a similar thing we could, I think, expect a similarly stern response. But the most that can be done with ISIS is simply to report the facts and let them sit there, as though they come from nowhere. As if the traditions of throwing gays off buildings or collapsing walls on them and so on are probably just accretions of colonial times with no connection to any religious tradition. ~ Douglas Murray
 
ISIL herded approximately 450−500 women and girls to the citadel of Tal Afar in Ninewa where, two days later, 150 unmarried girls and women, predominantly from the Yezidi and Christian communities, were reportedly transported to Syria, either to be given to ISIL fighters as a reward or to be sold as sex slaves, the report said. So where are the 'war on women' advocates? I know, crickets chirping. ~ Allen B. West
  • Daesh hates being referred to by this term, and what they don’t like has an instinctive ­appeal to me. … I absolutely refuse to refer to it by the title that it claims for itself (Islamic State), because I think this is a perversion of religion and a travesty of governance. … I’ve never used that term and I would strongly counsel people against ever using the presumptuous title that they have given themselves.
  • The world’s Muslims have a critical role in global understanding. Our faith, like yours, commands mercy, peace and tolerance. It upholds, as yours does, the equal human dignity of every person — men and women, neighbours and strangers. Those outlaws of Islam who deny these truths are vastly outnumbered by the ocean of believers — 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide. In fact, these terrorists have made the world’s muslims their greatest target. We will not allow them to hijack our faith.
  • Not only ISIS and Al-Nusra, every affiliated to Al-Qaeda organization within Syria, all of them are terrorists...we want to get rid of terrorists we want to defeat those terrorists while United States wants to manage those groups, in order to topple the government in Syria...Of course, ISIS has been set up in Iraq in 2006 while United States was in Iraq, not Syria in Iraq, so it was growing under supervision of the American authority in Iraq and they didn't do anything to fight ISIS in Iraq at that time...It's been expanding under supervision of American airplanes and they could have seen the ISIS using the oil field and exporting oil to Turkey and they didn't try to attack any convoy of ISIS, how could they be against ISIS?...How the Russian could have seen this since the first day and started to attack those convoys. Actually, Russian intervention unmasked the American intention regarding ISIS and the other terrorist groups, of course.
  • First of all, the sources of the Islamic State (IS) ideology and other al-Qaeda affiliate groups are the Wahabbi that has been supported by the royal family in Saudi Arabia...
  • We face a fundamental threat to our security. Isil have brutally murdered British hostages, they have inspired the worst terrorist attack against British people since 7/7 on the beaches of Tunisia, and they have plotted atrocity after atrocity on the streets here at home. Since November last year our security services have foiled no less than seven different plots against our people. So this threat is very real and the question is this: Do we work with our allies to degrade and destroy this threat and do we go after these terrorists in their heartlands from where they are plotting to kill British people, or do we sit back and wait for them to attack us?
    • David Cameron, "Britain could be bombing by midnight: Cameron on course to win crunch vote on airstrikes against ISIS in Syria with a majority of up to 100" in Daily Mail (2 December 2015)
  • The Russians have sometimes said one thing and done another... We know from long experience in Iraq and Afghanistan to take territory, hold territory, and govern territory and prevent a reemergence of a terrorist group... The bane of Iraq has been sectarianism... There are three components to Iraq... We vastly prefer a multi-sectarian Iraqi state to any form of disintegration because we know where that leads. Sectarianism leads to the kind of thing that ISIL represents. But, for that to work in Iraq? The Sunnis have to be represented, and they have to be part of the fight to take back their own territory. So, we are working with them a lot... The Russians have been way off track since the very beginning. They have not done what they said they were going to do and they are not doing what is in their interest to do in terms of fighting ISIL.
  • Today, we get a rare show of religious intolerance in the form of the Islamic State. Even more than the Taliban, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the new-fangled Caliphate represents our worst nightmare of Islam. Ever since TV brought its images of sensational events and acts of war into our very homes, we have not yet been treated to such explicit intolerance of a type we thought relegated to the past. While murder remains a fact of life, the formal beheading of (Yezidi and Assyrian) Infidels and of (Shiite) Heretics has become exceptional, a throw-back to the witches’ trials and religious wars of centuries ago. While exploitation remains a world problem, the actual taking of slaves to auction them off at the slave-market is eerily premodern. To be sure, for Indians it is not such an otherworldly fantasy. Their republic was born in 1947 in massacres unleashed by the militants and supporters of the Pakistan movement, finally killing a million or so and putting many millions to flight, most of them Hindus (including Sikhs). Many of you will remember the East Bengal genocide of 1971, where officially 3 million, according to scholars at least a million, were killed, most of them Hindus. In sheer magnitude, this death toll completely dwarfs anything that the Taliban or the Islamic State have done so far....
    The grim advantage that the Islamic State now enjoys, however, is the omnipresence of internet reporting, which they themselves promote with their youtube videos of beheadings and other atrocities. Uniquely in-your-face. Another sensational novelty is the official re-institution of slavery. Numerous victims of earlier rounds of violence have effectively been exploited as slaves, particularly as sex slaves (remember Pakistani General Tikka Khan in the Bangladesh war of 1971 justifying his soldiers’ rape campaign openly: “If we cannot hold East Bengal, we will make sure that the next generation of Bengalis consists of bastards”); but a formal institution of slavery, complete with slave markets and the official fixing of auction prices, that is truly a return to the premodern age. This we hadn’t seen in our lifetimes.
  • The Islamic State is not a state and I would predict fairly confidently that they are not going to establish a viable one and it is certainly not an attractive state... It is not a state in which millions of people are dying to live in a place which beheads people regularly and forces women into these highly constrained roles... It's true that liberalism is not doing well in that part of the world... But I do not think that radical Islam represents a long-term civilizational alternative to the kind of regimes that exist in Europe and North America and Asia.
  • Every day that you could read about an Israeli rocket gone astray or Israeli soldiers beating up an innocent teenager, you could have read about ISIS in Iraq crucifying people on the side of the road, Christians and Muslims. Where is the outrage in the Muslim world and on the Left over these crimes? Where are the demonstrations, 10,000 or 100,000 deep, in the capitals of Europe against ISIS? If Israel kills a dozen Palestinians by accident, the entire Muslim world is inflamed. God forbid you burn a Koran, or write a novel vaguely critical of the faith. And yet Muslims can destroy their own societies... What do groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, and even Hamas, want? They want to impose their religious views on the rest of humanity. They want to stifle every freedom that decent and educated and secular people care about. This is not a trivial difference. And yet, judging from the level of condemnation that Israel now receives, you would think the difference ran the other way. This kind of confusion puts us all in danger. This is the great story of our time. For the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children, we are going to be confronted by people who don't want to live peacefully in a secular pluralistic world because they are desperate to get to paradise, and they are willing to destroy the very possibility of human happiness along the way. The truth is, we are all living in Israel; it's just that some of us haven't realized it yet.
  • From 2011 through 2015 the situation was dire. In 2012 the US resolution at the UN called for President Assad to step down and both Russia and China vetoed it. The US and UK responded with “fury” according to The Guardian, while Syrians were out in the streets cheering. When Russian troops came in September of 2015, the priority was to put a stop to ISIS operations in the northeast. Massive ISIS oil convoys were taking the stolen oil up to Turkey, bringing the terrorist army equally massive amounts of money to use for their rampages while, according to a leaked, verified audio tape of John Kerry speaking with the Syrian opposition, the US was “watching ISIS grow” hoping the pressure would get Assad to negotiate. Instead, an appeal was made to Putin and answered. Within a few months, the ISIS oil convoys had been reduced significantly, cutting that cash flow.
  • To summarize, in my experience the Russians have indeed been effective in the fight against ISIS and al Qaeda while displaying professionalism, precision, and minimizing civilian casualties. The US has been using ISIS as a pretext for its own completely illegal occupation of the entire northeast third of Syrian lands, and has often been helping or working directly on behalf of the al Qaeda affiliate and similar terrorist groups.
  • Far from using Islam as a mere facade for bloodlust... The Islamic State’s interpretations of Koranic teachings are fundamental to its mission.
  • I think we can probably say with some confidence that if an evangelical Christian group threw gays off towers in the Deep South, gay media outlets would currently be lambasting the Christian churches for a history of homophobia which had led to this pass. There would be demands for every prominent and obscure Christian pastor to condemn this brutal act. And they would. If a group of group of deeply extrovert Jews did a similar thing we could, I think, expect a similarly stern response. But the most that can be done with ISIS is simply to report the facts and let them sit there, as though they come from nowhere. As if the traditions of throwing gays off buildings or collapsing walls on them and so on are probably just accretions of colonial times with no connection to any religious tradition.
  • How can you say that they're "Islamic"? just because "they call themselves Islamic," why are you repeating it? if I call myself the president of USA, will you repeat that...
  • The difference is that ISIS is armed with butcher knives, captured weapons and YouTube, whereas Iran could soon be armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs. We must always remember. I'll say it one more time; the greatest dangers facing our world is the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons. To defeat ISIS and let Iran get nuclear weapons would be to win the battle, but lose the war. We can't let that happen.
  • Iraq's losses mounted when ISIL took over Mosul. ISIL fighters captured Ajil and Himrin oilfields in Salaheddin province and Qayyarah and three others in Nineveh province. The production potential of these fields, 72,000 bpd under ideal conditions, was rather minuscule from Baghdad's perspective - the country at that time was exporting nearly 2.6 million bpd.
    But the real damage was in enabling ISIL to finance its war machine. It was able to generate an estimated $45 million a month selling the oil from these fields, and others in Syria, through a labyrinth of oil refining and smuggling operations. The windfall allowed it, for a while, to pay its fighters generously by local standards and keep its murderous campaign going for three long years.
  • As we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands. Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence. That’s the story ISIL wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit. We don’t need to build them up to show that we’re serious, nor do we need to push away vital allies in this fight by echoing the lie that ISIL is representative of one of the world’s largest religions. We just need to call them what they are — killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed.
  • ISIS wasn't a threat two years ago.  Why?  Because they would have probably been wiped out by Assad.  But we put six-hundred tons of weapons into the Syrian civil war, and what has happened?  We created a haven—not just usSaudi Arabia, Qatar‎, United Arab Emirates—they've poured weapons indiscriminately in there, and most of them have wound up in the hands of ISIS.
    • Sen. Rand Paul, (R-KY), Rand Paul in North Carolina on C-SPAN (1 October 2014)
  • We look forward to the coming, as soon as possible, of the caliphate. But the declaration issued by the Islamic State is void under sharia and has dangerous consequences for the Sunnis in Iraq and for the revolt in Syria.
  • What should the United States do about ISIS now that they've taken over half of Syria and a third of Iraq?

    The answer is: let Assad, the Iranians, the Turks, and, yes, the Russians take care of it, since they are the states directly threatened by the growth of the so-called Islamic State.  Why should we fight their war for them?

    Contrary to the War Party's hebephrenic appeals to intervene, inaction on our part is key to the destruction of ISIS.  The Grand Caliph of the Islamic State would like nothing more than to be able to portray ISIS as the valiant opponent of a US reentry into the region.  It would be a tremendous propaganda victory for them to be able to frame their cause in this context because the result would be a successful international recruiting drive that would fill the ranks of the Islamic State's army even as hundreds are killed by US drones and missile strikes.

  • No, we don't have to ally with Assad–or the Iranians, for that matter–for them to deal effectively with our monstrous creations.  We simply have to stand aside and watch as those states with a real stake in this fight are allowed to take aim and fire.  In this case, inaction is the most effective act we can take: by stopping our support for the Syrian Islamists, we cut off a major source of support for ISIS–and leave Assad free to go after them hammer and tongs.

    ISIS and its sympathizers worldwide would like nothing better than to lure us into another land war in the Middle East, one in which we would fare no better than we did last time around.  Yet that is the only alternative to the Rand Paul strategy.

  • And as for his claim that the Islamic State "is certainly not a state," the President's tone is rather too defensive.  He says "it is recognized by no government, nor by the people it subjugates," but none of these factors are relevant in determining what constitutes a state–which is nothing more or less than a monopoly on the use of force in a given territory.  The horror that is ISIL is merely the process of state formation looked at up close: the terror they employ is simply an exaggerated rendition of how every state gains its "legitimacy"–by definitively establishing its coercive monopoly.  While ISIL is doing so in a particularly graphic manner, in principle it is acting no differently than any other embryonic state in history, benign creation myths to the contrary notwithstanding.
  • This week, Unesco has added its voice to a chorus of concern, warning that looting in Iraq and Syria is taking place on an “industrial” scale – one more sorry aspect to the devastating conflicts in the region. This Mesopotamian area, the cradle of civilisation, is a giant archaeological site – it’s where the first cities were built, and contains treasures from the Roman, Greek, Byzantine and Islamic periods. Today, the pillaging of cultural heritage sites shows up on satellite maps that are pock-marked with hundreds of recent, illegal excavations. Some media reports suggest this income stream is the “second-largest source of revenue” for the group (after oil sales), but in reality it’s impossible to tell. What’s certain is that, while Isis grimly documents its destruction of Unesco sites such as Nimrud, profiteering from plundered antiquities has helped make it the most cash-rich terror group in the world.
  • Using information gathered by local Syrian activists, Al-Azm found that Isis initially levied 20% taxes on those it “licensed” to excavate. In mid-2014, the group began to contract out excavation. But by autumn of that same year, Isis was “starting to hire their own archaeologists, digging teams and machinery – and that’s when we saw a peak of looting activity”. At that point, the trade was lucrative enough for Isis to invest in it. All this coincided with the US-led coalition’s bombing campaign against Isis targets, which curtailed other income streams such as oil, livestock and crops from seized areas. Isis began to enforce punishments for looting without a licence, says Al-Azm. The group started to control the dealers and middle men, getting savvy to the market, scouring the internet to see which artefacts would sell at a higher value.
  • We are truly in a battle for our very lives not just in the sense that they will kill us if they can, but in the sense that life itself is being challenged, that it's life versus death, you either love life or you love death, creation versus destruction, love versus hatred, that's what this is about. And so, when we see the Islamic State (ISIS), we see not only that they embody Islam as I have explained here in this, that's all in the Quran what they do, but also that they embody what may be, the foremost evil force that the world has ever seen.
  • The shocking publicized murder of a Jordanian pilot, a wonderful young man — spoke to the King of Jordan; they all knew him, they all loved him — he was burned alive in a cage for all to see. And the execution of Christians in Libya and Egypt, as well as the genocidal mass murder of Yazidis, rank ISIS among the most depraved organizations in the history of our world.
  • ISIL herded approximately 450−500 women and girls to the citadel of Tal Afar in Ninewa where, two days later, 150 unmarried girls and women, predominantly from the Yezidi and Christian communities, were reportedly transported to Syria, either to be given to ISIL fighters as a reward or to be sold as sex slaves, the report said. So where are the 'war on women' advocates? I know, crickets chirping. The progressive socialist feminist movement would rather not have Obama admit he was wrong than save these women.

Quotes by Amir TaheriEdit

 
So, is “Caliph Ibrahim” of the Islamic State an extremist, a militant, a terrorist or an Islamic fighter? None of the above. All those labels imply behavior that makes some sort of sense in terms of human reality and normal ideologies.
 
The Islamic State’s most noteworthy embrace of the works of the “Infidel,” however, is surely its use of the satanic Internet. Its personnel, including converts from Europe and North America, regularly display across the Web what seems to be the main, if not the only, thing they’ve learned from Islam: cutting the throats of defenseless captives.
 
The core of the Syrian tragedy consists of the fact that Assad and ISIS represent the two faces of the same coin. Both want the Syrian people, or what is left of them inside the country, scripted out of the equation.
  • It might come as a surprise to many, but the truth is that Islam today no longer has a living and evolving theology. In fact, with few exceptions, Islam’s last genuine theologians belong to the early part of the 19th century. Go to any mosque anywhere, whether it is in New York or Mecca, and you are more likely to hear a political sermon rather than a theological reflection. In the highly politicized version of Islam promoted by Da’esh... God plays a cameo role at best. Deprived of its theological moorings, today’s Islam is a wayward vessel under the captaincy of ambitious adventurers leading it into sectarian feuds, wars and terrorism.
  • “Pure Mohammadan Islam”: This is what ISIS, Daesh in Arabic, promises to deliver once the caliphate has defeated “Infidel” enemies and secured its position. The promise is at the core of its propaganda, including in cyberspace. Its recent blitzkrieg victories and high-profile beheadings are not the only reason ISIS has attracted universal attention. Perhaps more interesting is Daesh’s ability to seduce large numbers of Muslims across the globe, including in Europe and the United States. It does so with an ideological “product” designed to replace other brands of Islamism marketed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Khomeinists in Iran. Daeshism, to coin a phrase, also aimed to transcend the ideological hodgepodge marketed by al Qaeda franchises.
  • The promised “Pure Mohammadan Islam” is based on three rejections... The first rejection is of traditional Islamic tolerance for Christians and Jews — who, labeled “People of the Book,” could live in a caliphate by paying protection money (jizyeh). The idea is that the “protection” offered by Mohammad belonged to the early phase of Islam when the “Last Prophet” wasn’t strong enough. Once Mohammad had established his rule, the Daeshites note, he ordered the massacre of Jews and the expulsion of Christians from the Arabian Peninsula... The second rejection is aimed against “Infidel ideologies,” especially democracy — government of men by men rather than by Allah... Daesh’s third rejection is aimed against what is labeled “diluted” (iltiqati) forms of Islam — for example, insisting that Islam is a religion of peace. In Daesh’s view, Islam will be a religion of peace only after it has seized control of the entire world. Until then, the world will be divided between the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the House of War (Dar al-Harb). There can never be peace between Islam and whatever that is not Islam. At best, Muslims can make truce (solh) with non-Muslims while continuing to prepare for the next war. Daesh also rejects the “aping of Infidel institutions” such as a presidential system, a parliament and the use of such terms as “republic.” The only form of government in “Pure Mohammadan Islam” is the caliphate; the only law is sharia.
  • Ever since its emergence a few months ago, the declared ambition of the startup caliphate of the Islamic State has been to “wipe out every trace of Infidel influence” in areas under its control. Yet, with each passing day, it becomes more clear that, its deadly fantasies notwithstanding, the IS can’t escape from a world created and dominated by the Infidel. Start with the name that the IS, or Daesh in Arabic, has chosen for itself: ad-dawlat al-Islamiyah, or “Islamic Government.” The concepts of “state” and “government” are entirely Western, not adopted by Muslim peoples until the 19th century. The very words “state” and “government” are never mentioned in the Quran. Daesh’s “caliph” has also appointed a number of vizirs. This, too, is un-Islamic. Of Persian origin, the word vizir designated high officials of the pre-Islamic Sasanian Empire overthrown by Arab Muslim warriors in the 7th century. Mohammad had no vizirs, nor did any of his four immediate successors, the so-called “Well Guided caliphs...” The Islamic State’s most noteworthy embrace of the works of the “Infidel,” however, is surely its use of the satanic Internet. Its personnel, including converts from Europe and North America, regularly display across the Web what seems to be the main, if not the only, thing they’ve learned from Islam: cutting the throats of defenseless captives.
  • It is not solely by weapons that ISIS imposes its control. More important is the terror it has instilled in millions in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and, increasingly, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Indeed, Jordan’s panic-driven decision to execute two jihadists in response to the burning of its captured pilot is another sign of the terror Daesh has instilled in Arab governments and much of the public. In the short run, terror is a very effective means of psychological control of unarmed and largely defenseless populations. Even in areas far from Daesh’s reach, growing numbers of preachers, writers, politicians and even sheiks and emirs, terrorized by unprecedented savagery, are hedging their bets. Today, Daesh is a menacing presence not only in Baghdad but in Arab capitals from Cairo to Muscat — an evil ghost capable of launching attacks in the Sinai and organizing deadly raids on Jordanian and Saudi borders. ISIS enjoys yet another advantage: It has a clear strategy of making areas beyond its control unsafe. No one thinks Daesh can seize Baghdad, but few Baghdadis feel they’re living anything close to a normal life. Daesh’s message is clear: No one is safe anywhere, including in non-Muslim lands, until the whole world is brought under “proper Islamic rule.”
  • They've created ISIS. Hillary Clinton created ISIS with Obama — created with Obama. But I love predicting because you know, ultimately, you need somebody with vision.
  • The core of the Syrian tragedy consists of the fact that Assad and ISIS represent the two faces of the same coin. Both want the Syrian people, or what is left of them inside the country, scripted out of the equation. Both have enough of a popular base to hang on for some more time even if they did not receive succor from the outside which they regularly do. At the same time neither is strong enough or is ever likely to have the popular base to impose its agenda on Syria.
  • The US State Department's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism has found that going by the number of terror attacks and the number of killings of innocent citizens every year from 2012 until now, the big-five terror group consists of the IS, Taliban, Boko Haram, al Qaeda, and the Communist Party of India (Maoist).
    • US State Department's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism quoted in Vivek Agnihotri - Urban Naxals The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2018, Garuda Prakashan)

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