Syria: the unravelling continues

Aug 13, 2016 by

By Tim Black, Spiked online:

The weakening of ISIS is no victory for the West.

With the loss of territory, especially in oil-rich Iraq, ISIS’s revenues are drying up, too. Reports suggest that it is having to cut fighters’ pay, levy new taxes, and, in a fiat born of desperation rather than devotion, increase fines for breaking its religious code. ISIS, which won adherents so quickly by dint of its sheer success, its fearful potency, is now losing them just as quickly, as its failures mount and its impotence emerges. Kurdish forces claim that ISIS fighters are now shaving off their beards, and even disguising themselves as women, in an attempt to flee Syria with the refugees.

But there can be no celebration among Western leaders, who, at various points, have dubbed ISIS ‘the most serious threat’ to our way of life, and the fight against it the ‘greatest struggle of our generation’. Not because ISIS is not as barbaric as it’s been cracked up to be. It is and more. No, there can be no celebration because ISIS’s slow-motion collapse is no victory. Rather, it’s another phase in the unravelling of a region, another stage in the unfolding chaos, a climatic alteration in the ongoing storm that has engulfed what’s left of Iraq and Syria, and redrawn territorial boundaries as quickly as the institutions of civil society have been cast asunder.

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See also: Christians in Aleppo face death on all sides, from Barnabas Fund

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