TrentVilla Posted June 16, 2014 Moderator Share Posted June 16, 2014 Am I correct in thinking that this ISIS who are executing Iraqis en masse and in atrocious ways are the same group opposing Assad in Syria? If so, why on earth did we even consider helping them? They're hardcore Muslim fundamentalists and I thought the mission was to stop these monsters. AWOL is your man on this but no I don't believe they are the same people we supporting, they are one of two distinct groups fighing Assad, we backed the other horse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maqroll Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 If so, why on earth did we even consider helping them? They're hardcore Muslim fundamentalists and I thought the mission was to stop these monsters. Ideology is maleable. We loved the Taliban when they were "Freedom Fighters" battling the Soviets. It's all bullshit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bannedfromHandV Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 Ah okay, would make more sense. Some of the ISIS images released recently are sickening, I know we operate in a different culture, society and seemingly age to these folk but I still find it amazing that human beings can do this sort of stuff to one another. I've always thought I could do some serious damage to an individual that harmed my family (including my dog) but these people probably haven't personally done a thing to them, it's mind blowing and scary. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bannedfromHandV Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 If so, why on earth did we even consider helping them? They're hardcore Muslim fundamentalists and I thought the mission was to stop these monsters. Ideology is maleable. We loved the Taliban when they were "Freedom Fighters" battling the Soviets. It's all bullshit. Yeah I get that whole 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.....until they become my enemy' thing but Assad, for all his sins hasn't been an enemy of the west (has he?) whereas those vying for power could well be. You can't condone the use of chemicals etc but seems maybe Hague et al May have jumped the gun a little in identifying Assad as the enemy in the conflict Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrisp65 Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 I think it's fair to say that after a hundred years, many wars, many allegiances, drones, spy planes and satellites. After listening in on phones and filtering the internet. After doing deals and being complicit in torture. We haven't got a **** clue what's going on out there. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maqroll Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 I think for a lot of these guys, these groups offer what their crippled societies can't- a job. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrentVilla Posted June 16, 2014 Moderator Share Posted June 16, 2014 I think for a lot of these guys, these groups offer what their crippled societies can't- a job. Agreed, much like growing Poppies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mantis Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 If so, why on earth did we even consider helping them? They're hardcore Muslim fundamentalists and I thought the mission was to stop these monsters. Ideology is maleable. We loved the Taliban when they were "Freedom Fighters" battling the Soviets. It's all bullshit. Yeah I get that whole 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.....until they become my enemy' thing but Assad, for all his sins hasn't been an enemy of the west (has he?) whereas those vying for power could well be. You can't condone the use of chemicals etc but seems maybe Hague et al May have jumped the gun a little in identifying Assad as the enemy in the conflict Not directly but I think the Assad regime has (and continues to) sponsor terrorist groups. It's important to remember that there is almost a civil war within a civil war here as the moderate Free Syrian Army and the Islamists have been fighting each other as well as the government. We've backed the moderates but unfortunately the Islamists seem to have the upper hand at the moment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blandy Posted June 16, 2014 Moderator Share Posted June 16, 2014 ....there are plenty of countries which are not homogeneous when it comes to religious belief yet there are no sectarian problems. True. Yet the ones where there are problems are those where there is discrimination on religious lines - where one religion's followers are treated as "lower" than another's -whether its prods and catholics, Muslims and Christians or Jews or different sects Sunni/Shia. There's plenty of my sky fairy is better than your sky fairy-ism about. Are you talking about the countries which are not religiously heterogeneous or countries in general? Because I can think of plenty of divided countries and societies where religions plays little or no part at all. If your question was to me, and if by "not homogeneous" you mean "not all people are the same religion" then I'm saying what I wrote - people of one religion being looked down on and mistreated and so on, because of their "inferior" religion is a major cause of conflict and problems. Almost by definition, those countries will have a problem because of the inherent discrimination on religious grounds. It's utter bonkers to someone like me, how one imaginary sky fairy is seen as better than another, and how that is then transposed into some people being seen as better than others because of their following the cult of that sky fairy. That's bad enough, but then mistreatment of people makes it even worse. It's just ridiculous. I'd hope that folk would move on from all that medieval and prior claptrap, that education, knowledge and science and facts would over-ride all the superstition and so on, but sadly not. This common definition sums it up, for me.Christianity: The belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. That belief is to me unsustainable, whatever the religion followed,. just loopy. Though if people want to believe in this stuff, of their own volition, rather than indoctrination, that's fine in my world. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mantis Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 (edited) What exactly are you getting at? It's not like there's widespread conflict in every country where there isn't one overwhelmingly dominant religion and as I said, there are plenty of countries where there are serious divisions and conflict that have nothing to do with religion. At the end of the day religion isn't the problem here but bigots who can't accept that others have opinions or beliefs that differ from their own. If everyone did that there would be a lot less conflict, religious, political or nationalistic. Edited June 16, 2014 by Mantis Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blandy Posted June 16, 2014 Moderator Share Posted June 16, 2014 I suppose it depends on how you look at things. I think At the end of the day religion isn't the problem here but bigots who can't accept that others have opinions or beliefs that differ from their own. is the same as At the end of the day religious bigotry is a problem, yes. Of course it might be the case that if these religious bigots didn't have religion to get all uppity about, they'd find something else, but the ready grouping of sky fairy believers of one type or another into them and us groups does rather (to me) suggest that religion is playing a huge part in causing conflict. It's hypothetical whether fanatical blue sky fairy followers would still be nasty to people if they weren't indoctrinated with zeal for their fairy, but the fact is they are full of the glory of their fairy as opposed to the red sky fairy which other people think is the true one. take the sky fairies out of it. let people see that life is as it is, not as some imaginary supreme omnipotent being that's been made up "says" it is. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mantis Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 (edited) Actually, bigotry in general is a problem, not just the religious kind. Yes I do think that if many of these people weren't religious they would find something else to fight over - it's not like there aren't alternatives that are fought over just as much these days. The fact that there are plenty of religious people who are decent people who don't feel the need to have conflict with others who don't share their beliefs tells me that the problem lies with a certain kind of person, not whatever it is they believe in. I can't really think of any characteristics that are exclusive to religious extremists. One need only to look at many political extremists past and present to see that. Edited June 16, 2014 by Mantis Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrisp65 Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 I think maybe the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos etc., not to mention Mao's China, Stalin's USSR, Shining Path, Khmer Rouge, Red Army Faction, the American Civil War, Pinochet, the Contras and a hundred others suggest it doesn't take too long for something else to fill the gap religion might leave as an excuse to kill 'the others'. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Awol Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 Am I correct in thinking that this ISIS who are executing Iraqis en masse and in atrocious ways are the same group opposing Assad in Syria? If so, why on earth did we even consider helping them? They're hardcore Muslim fundamentalists and I thought the mission was to stop these monsters. I don't believe they are the same people we supporting, they are one of two distinct groups fighing Assad, we backed the other horse. There are literally 100's of different groups in the anti Assad forces but at the broadest level they break down into secular democrats (who "we" have supported to a limited extent) and Islamists, with varying degrees of extremism. The most powerful Islamist groups are the Islamic Front (an umbrella for seven major and dozens of smaller groups), Jabat al Nusra (the official franchise of Al Qaeda in Syria) and bringing up the rear is ISIS. Al Nusra was formed by the second in command of AQ in Iraq (Islamic state of Iraq - ISI) at the instruction of Zawahiri, the overall boss of AQ core in Pakistan. Al Nusra learnt from the mistakes of ISI and didn't behave brutally to local civilians in Syria, provided a broad spectrum of civil services in areas they controlled and cooperated well with other Syrian jihadists groups. Al Baghdadi, the head of ISI and as extreme as they come, then decided to expand ISI into ISIS and slip Syria into his own portfolio. Baghdadi ordered his former protege and now head of the powerful Al Nusra to fall in under ISIS' banner which he refused to do, eventually sparking a civil war between the jihadis and effective excommunication of ISIS from the AQ tent when Baghdadi refused an order from Zawahiri to withdraw his forces to Iraq. However ISIS' uber extremist nature and ideology attracted many foreign fighters and is now home to many of the British Muslim contingent fighting out there - hence the real fear of UK authorities that they will bring their war home sooner or later.. ISIS then launched this recent offensive in Iraq (where they already held significant territory in the western Anbar province) and are cooperating with various domestic Sunni groups who've been marginalised by the Shia PM Maliki's sectarian policies. If that alliance holds together Iraq is in trouble, if it fragments then ISIS will probably stop trying to hold ground and return to high intensity sophisticated terror campaign. In terms of "who" we were supporting, in theory it was the anti Assad democrats not the jihadists - who are bankrolled by Saudi, Qatar and other Gulfies. In reality if Assad falls the far more numerous and powerful jihadists (Islamic Front alone has 60,000 fighters) will replace him and massacre the Shia and Christian minorities before turning on each other. In that sense supporting anyone against Assad is tantamount to backing Al Qaeda types, but then he's been murdering, torturing and chemical bombing his own people by the 1000's as well. In an even broader sense this is simply a proxy battle between Saudi and Iran which is being played out in various other countries around the region (Bahrain, Yemen,etc). Those who say it's about power are right but that is indivisible from the religious aspect. Islam is an all encompassing ideology that governs the religious, political and social spheres. The battle is for supremacy between two competing strains of Islam, one controlled from Riyadh and the other from Tehran. That's why we can't fix it,and why we shouldn't even try. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dodgyknees Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 Revolting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarewsEyebrowDesigner Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 I can't help but think any 'pact' with Iran is just the USA playing the long game and hoping to destabalise Tehran by getting it involved in a drawn out war with extremists (if not the Saudi's directly, but I doubt that will happen). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrisp65 Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 I can't help but think any 'pact' with Iran is just the USA playing the long game and hoping to destabalise Tehran by getting it involved in a drawn out war with extremists (if not the Saudi's directly, but I doubt that will happen). well, it certainly worked a treat when they got into a long drawn out war against Iraq Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bannedfromHandV Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 Gotta be honest, can't see anything but good coming from a US/Iran Alliance. Could begin breaking down some major barriers, tho I know that's blue sky thinking 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrentVilla Posted June 17, 2014 Moderator Share Posted June 17, 2014 Gotta be honest, can't see anything but good coming from a US involvement in the Middle East Fixed for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrisp65 Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 If the money we'd spent on wars and espionage had instead been spent drilling a huge great **** off pipeline from southern Italy or Greece, under Egypt and across to the oil where we could simply syphon it off unnoticed, we'd be minted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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