Paris: ISIS Feels The Pressure

We have all heard the horrible, and all too familiar news about the attack in Paris. The young perpetrators, who still seemed to be battle-hardened, were armed with bombs, AK-47 automatic rifles, and suicide vests. All of these are the bloody trademark characteristics of Muslim hatred.  I listened to President Obama’s speech last night as he promised to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the French people and recited that this was a crime against humanity. I agree with his remark regarding our long-standing French friendship, but the attack was not aimed at humanity but at the home of the crusaders, that catchall Muslim justification for their cauldron of hate.

One has to wonder if ISIS is responsible for this atrocity. If so, they have taken a giant leap in coordination, something most anti-terrorism experts previously felt was the sole domain of al-Qaeda. But if it turns out to be an ISIS operation, as ISIS currently claims, then the West needs to brace itself for more of these attacks.

As Muslim terror groups go, ISIS up to this point was fairly unique. They brashly named themselves a caliphate and demanded that Muslims everywhere declare loyalty to the caliphate and the caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It’s one thing to have the name but quite another to have a protective air force, which ISIS does not. A caliphate, by definition, must hold land and that is why ISIS was hell-bent on spreading out as quickly as possible. Their army was nimble but thin. After all, a Toyota pick-up does not offer protection from bombs. As long as the ISIS murderers were successful, their public relations minions could make recruiting videos, some with snappy-looking black-clad soldiers, some simply horrific, and this brought in fresh fighters, the literal life-blood of the caliphate. All went well at first because the west offered token and uncoordinated resistance, a result of ten years of fighting in the region.

But then Vladimir Putin entered the fray and did it with heavy weapons. While Putin is primarily there to secure Bashar al-Assad, the Russian air force pulverized ISIS if they were in contact with pro-Assad forces. With Putin all in, the West and Barack Obama had to do something, hence the more timely and more frequent attacks by U. S. forces, to include an increased ground role. The ISIS invincibility was vanishing as the Iraqi forces, Kurdish Peshmerga forces, and various groups in Syria began to make gains on the ground against ISIS. What is ISIS to do in order to keep the lifeline of foreign fighters coming? They go to big soft targets like Paris.

The death knell for the invincible Caliphate can be heard. Putin and the Western forces that were dragged in to the fighting will probably finish the job. The butchery in Paris will bring additional fortitude into the equation, and the very desperate act to induce more volunteers will backfire. And finally, don’t fall for the crusader gambit. Mohammad himself began the first crusade when he and his Muslim hoard set out to conquer the adjoining lands that had been settled by Christian churches for 600 years.