“By announcing the caliphate, they are picking a fight with everybody,” says David Kilcullen, a guerrilla warfare expert and former chief counter-terrorism strategist for the U.S. State Department…
Religious scholars across the region called the caliphate “nonsense.” Arabic-language Facebook pages popped up to satirize the elusive IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and imaged his rejection of a “friend” request from the al-Qaida boss, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Even al-Qaida considers IS too extreme…
“In Iraq, 99 percent of the Sunni Arabs don’t want to live under a caliphate,” says , who served as a political adviser to U.S. ambassadors and top military commanders in Iraq and the Middle East from 2003 to 2010. He resigned in protest when the U.S. supported Maliki’s second term as prime minister.
“Iraqis like to drink, dance, and smoke. They don’t want to be ruled by Chechens and Afghans and live under 7th-century standards,” Khedery says.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member