Soldiers of End-Times by Ido Levy

Author:Ido Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2023-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

4

Sources of IS Military Effectiveness

Through its robust style of conventional warfare, the Islamic State conquered large territories. The group’s adversaries needed considerable U.S. and international support to crack IS defenses and still paid heavy prices to dislodge the jihadists. An apocalyptic ideology motivated the Islamic State’s military campaigns, but how did the group develop its military skills? Indeed, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq was a far cry in its military capabilities from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s IS. This chapter examines the sources of IS military effectiveness and posits that it can be traced directly to the group’s development since 2003.

Previous research has focused on two possible explanations for IS military effectiveness: the influence of either the former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime or the foreign fighters from post-Soviet republics. IS military acumen, according to one explanation, derived from disenfranchised past members of Saddam’s regime.1 The other explanation claims that foreign fighters from post-Soviet republics—notably, veterans of the Chechen wars against Russia and the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, and the Chechen IS commander Omar al-Shishani in particular—were most responsible for the Islamic State’s success.2 This study, however, finds that a purported Baathist influence on IS was insignificant to its military effectiveness, while Russian-speaking foreign fighters did make a considerable, though not decisive, contribution.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.