“Vast new intelligence haul fuels next phase of fight against Islamic State:” Los Angeles Times.

The headline introduces a story that this column has predicted for many years now. The caliphate in Syria and Iraq is slowly being defeated, a cause for celebration no doubt.

However, the legacy of the Islamic State or the levant will be the 19,000 known Mujahedeen (Warriors of God) currently on the INTERPOL watch list. New documents discovered in Syria and Iraq are adding tens of thousands to the list of ISIS/ISIL trained terrorists.

A young person travels to the Islamic State, is trained and indoctrinated; he/she returns home and their service to Allah is celebrated by family and friends. The trained and fully indoctrinated Mujahedeen light weapons infantry spread throughout the world and are in a holding pattern, waiting for the call to Jihad. Estimates of the strength of the radical Army of Allah are all over the place, but a low number will be some 50,000.

These people are admired and respected by the population; they are the new vanguard of a movement that the United States has been fighting since 1802. Every ISIS/ISIL trained Warrior of Allah will indoctrinate others, radicalize others; exactly how many is anyone’s guess, but the math is not good for the non-Muslim world or even the not-properly-pious Muslim world. The real problem with the way we are fighting the wars in Iraq and Syria is that we are doing it in a very restrained way. The Russians came into Syria and took the fight to the enemy and things started to happen. The Caliphate began losing ground, the Russians attacked Raqqa, the capital city of the Levant with a vengeance, and it was the beginning of the end of ISIS/ISIL in Syria and Iraq.

Every day for the past four years young men and women have been radicalized in Iraq and Syria and sent worldwide, but the history of the ISIS/ISIL/DAESH movement goes back to its founding as Jama-at-Tawhid wal-Jihad in 1999. A hard-core cadre of radical imams pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and started to control portions of over a dozen nations.

The United States never set a firm policy to defeat these folks; indeed, we can’t even agree on what to name them, ISIS or ISIL or Daesh or the Caliphate. Regardless of what we call them the damage is done; even in defeat they win. As the history of the Caliphate is taught in Mosques and Madrasas around the world, it will be the story of a few valiant warriors of Allah with help of God fighting bravely against the combined forces of the unbelievers, the unholy, the infidels of the entire world.

Dohokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombers, are not mass murders of the innocent; in most of the Muslim world they are the heroic warriors of Allah who held off and stood firm against 6,000 attacking infidels. The 6,000 number is the number of law enforcement and National Guard forces who were looking for them after the bombing. The unfortunate truth is that the fight with these folks restarted in earnest in 1967 with the defeat of the combined Arab Armies in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The training and equipping of tens of thousands of radicals in Syria and Iraq in the last few years will ensure that your grandchildren’s children will fight these folks.

The unmitigated crap being put out in the news is that Afghanistan is our longest war; just not true. We are the home by Christmas, solve the major crime in a one-hour TV program, instant meal or fast food folks, who do not wish to be told this war is a cultural war, a religious war and it will take generations to fight. We need to reassess the way we fight and take a page out of the Russians book in Syria.
Nothing succeeds like success and the Radical Islamists are perceived as winning and winning big in the Muslim world.