ISIS believes they are martyrs of Allah.
Breakdown that sentence and then repost. They LITERALLY, live to die. Maybe not EACH individual person, but their overall mission is martyrdom in the name of Allah until there is no other religion but Islam.
Show me where you're getting that from.
I'm not interested in what YOU think.
I'm interested in where al Baghdadi, or al-‘Adnani, or some other known Daesh leader or spokesperson has actually stated that the goals of their organization, or the aspirations of its members, sync with what you're claiming.
I think you're sort of conflating a willingness to martyr one's self with an actual desire to do the same.
I'll say it again, Daesh isn't al Qa'ida.
They don't want to blow themselves up in order to get their 40 virgins and a mule.
They're fighting to first establish, and later grow, the global caliphate.
Like Patton said, "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
These guys aren't afraid to die, but they aren't suicide bombers - they're soldiers.
I suggest taking a deployment to Afghanistan to learn the ways of terrorism, then maybe graduating to going over to Iraq and coming face to face with one of them and ask for yourself
I signed up to go over to Iraq the first go-round.
For better or for worse the coalition wound up kicking their ass in 100 hours and very few guys got the opportunity to rotate through and I wound up riding out my enlistment in Germany.
I'm too old to try to do it again today.
That, however, being neither here nor there, I'd like to know how you sort of metastasize out a couple of pumps overseas as a lower enlisted in a National Guard Infantry unit into some overriding deep understanding of all things terrorism?
I mean, props for going over there and shooting a couple booger-eaters in the face, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous, but if you expect me to defer to you as some kind of "expert" on terrorism because you got a very small, very narrow, gound-eye view of the war in a very particular AO for a relatively brief period of time I'd think you were kidding me if I didn't know better.
I recently sat down and had beers with a couple of friends who had served from the mid-1990s through the GWOT until recent retirement, among them two SF NCOs, an MI LTC, and an Infantry 1SG and PLT SGT, and these guys don't really have a solid grasp of "The Terrorism".
They had some great stories, some awesome GoPro video, and a couple Silver Star commendations between them, but if these guys don't profess to be experts I really can't see why you would.