Grif Term Paper Essays - Military History By Country, Free Essays

Grif Term Paper Essays - Military History By Country, Free Essays The US-led Coalition Air Campaign Against ISIS Riley Stallings 4/20/18 In last decade, terrorism has gone up by a factor of a four. Its as simple as that. In that last six years, the number of fatalities from terrorist acts in the world increased from roughly 15,000 to a peak of almost 44,000 deaths in 2014. ( Max Roser, Mohamed Nagdy , Hannah Ritchie , 2018) This has coincided with the growth and increased activity of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Da ' esh, in Arabic), or ISIS as it is more commonly referred, in nations such as Iraq and Syria, where it ' s numbers are most prevalent. This Islamic state is a " transnational Sunni Islamist insurgent and terrorist group that controls large areas of Iraq and Syria . " (Christopher Blanchard, Carla Humud, Congressional Research Service, 2017) It has affiliates in several other countries, as well as large groups of supporters worldwide. The group has only since been recognized as one o f the largest threats to worldwide security and human rights in the last four years, despite its founding almost 20 years ago. In 2014, many nations of the world, lead by the United States, formed a coalition, which now has 75 partners worldwide, with the goal of " degrading and ultimately defeating Daesh. " (The Global Coalition, 2014) This coalition has coordinated efforts to reduce the size and power of the Islamic state through military action, and the development of strategies and tactics to reduce the number of personnel. This coalition and its actions, specifically its use of air strikes, have been called into question and have gained a lot of attention about the ethical responsibility of the coalition. Examination of the casualty data in the Middle East , from the nations that are the most afflicted by the Islamic State, has brought forward criticism of the ever-growing number of civilian lives taken by these airstrikes. The US-led coalition ' s air cam paign against the Islamic State has had a profound affect on not only the population of the Islamic state, but also the population of civilians living in and around territories occupied by the Islamic State. The Islamic state has a history of over a decade of power struggles, mostly relating to the changing over of leadership, and struggles with its affiliation with other groups in the Middle East . According to Kenneth Katzman, a specialist in Middle East ern Affairs at the Congressional Research Service, in 2006, a leader in the Al Qaeda organization, branched off of the organization and created the self-titled Al Qaeda in Iraq, which he later rebranded into the Islamic State in Iraq. This is the first emergence of the Islamic State in the Middle East . Later, in 2013, after the suicide bombing of the leader of the first Islamic State, Abu Ayyub Al-Masri, a new leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, had taken over and, he rebrands the organization into the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria, as we now know the terrorist organization. (Tara John, Time Magazine) According to Fawaz A Gerges, who wrote ISIS: A History , this organization began to extend their reach, spreading to and conquering the City of Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. In the fighting for control of Mosul, the Islamic State reduced the size of the Iraqi Security Force, which was a US-trained and US-funded group, from roughly 280,000 active duty personnel to a mere 50,000 men. The author then goes on to talk about how the US president at the time, President Barack Obama, dismissed this somewhat obvious danger to international security as amateurish and that it did not present a serious threat to America ' s or its allies ' interests. In Barack Obama ' s exact words, " The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a j.v. ' team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn ' t make them Kobe Bryant. . . . I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various