A couple corrections:
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The Middle man between Iran and Hezbollah was Bashar al-Asad of Syria. Despite being a Sunni, he is a secular dictator who hated Israel and coopperated with Iran.
Bashar Al-Assad was not Sunni, he was Alawite, which is a subset of Shia Islam. Sunnis make up the majority in Syria, but Alawites held nearly every position in the government with the remaining jobs going to Shia and hardly any to the majority Sunni.
The Al-Assad crime family is not a secular dictatorship. On paper, their government (B'aath Party) is supposedly secular but in reality anywhere B'aathism has been implemented you see a minority sect take total control of all the branches of government and army.
In Iraq, the Sunni minority, actually a minority of the Sunni minority, the Tikrit mafia, ran the show while Saddam was in power, and oppressed the other minority, the Kurds, and the majority Shia. In Syria, the minority Alawite ruled with the other minority Shia, and oppressed the majority Sunni.
These countries would be better described as tribal/minority religious dictatorships with secular overtones.
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Israel perceived Asad as the weakest link in the enemy's chain and began funding a radical Islamic insurgency with the goal of overthrowing Asad, which would a) destabilize a powerful and hostile Arab state on their border, and b) sever the link between Hezbollah and Iran.
-This group became known as ISIS and succeed in not only all but destroying Asad's regime, but taking over a good part of Iraq as well. This serves Israel's interests but creating a powerful Sunni buffer state between themselves and Iran.
That is simply ahistorical. ISIS was born of the remnants of the previous organization "Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant" which was founded in the late 1990's by Jordanian Al-Zarqawi.
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HOW ISIS WAS CREATED
1989 - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Jordanian founding father of Islamic State, arrives in Pakistan to join the mujahideen, just as the Soviet army quits Afghanistan.
1992 - Zarqawi returns to Jordan and is placed immediately under surveillance.
1999 - Zarqawi leaves Jordan for Pakistan to pick up where he left off several years before.
2000 - Zarqawi is in charge of a training camp in Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city, on the border with Iran, a camp that carried a sign that read “al-tawhid wal-Jihad” (Monotheism and Jihad) which would later become the name of his group in Iraq.
7 August 2003 - Operatives from tawhid wal-Jihad bomb the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad and assassinate Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
2003-2005 - The Zarqawists are still a minority in Iraq’s insurgency landscape.
January 2006 - Zarqawi announces the creation of the Mujahideen Advisory Council of Iraq.
7 June 2006 - Zarqawi is killed in a US air attack, and the advisory council appoints Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian national who used another nom de guerre, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir.
October 2006 - Muhajir declares that his franchise is part of Iraq’s homegrown Islamic resistance movements, which he named the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), to be led by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, a native Iraqi.
April 2010 - Both Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Muhajir are killed.
May 2010 - Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is appointed leader of ISI.
In August 2011 - during Ramadan, Baghdadi dispatches half a dozen of his lieutenants to establish a franchise in Syria, which was formed in December under Jabhat al-Nusra li ahl al-Sham (the Support Front for the People of Syria).
April 2013 - Baghdadi unilaterally declares a merger between Jabhat al-Nusra and ISI and calls it the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).
28 June 2014 - On Ramadan’s first day, Baghdadi abrogates ISIS and heralds the birth of Islamic State.
The uprising in Syria was part of the larger Arab spring and actually started as peaceful civilian protests due to a few teenagers being executed by the government for writing anti-regime graffiti. The tensions were there for decades, but that was the small spark that lit the bonfire that eventually became the Syrian civil war. It was their Muhammad Bouazizi moment (the Tunisian man who lit himself on fire to protest the government and started the larger Arab Spring.)
"The Civil Uprising phase of the Syrian Civil War was an early stage of protests and violence in the ongoing Syrian conflict, lasting from March to 28 July 2011. The uprising evolved from initially minor protests, beginning as early as January 2011, as a response to the regional Arab Spring, government corruption and human rights abuses. The uprising phase was marked by massive anti-government opposition demonstrations against the Ba'athist government of Bashar al-Assad, meeting with police and military violence, massive arrests and brutal crackdown, resulting in hundreds of casualties and thousands of wounded.
Despite Bashar al-Assad's attempts to pacify the protests with massive crackdown and use of censorship on one hand and concessions on the other, by the end of April, it became clear the situation was getting out of his control and the Syrian government deployed numerous troops on the ground.
The civil uprising phase created the platform for emergence of militant opposition movements and massive defections from the Syrian Army, which gradually transformed the conflict from a civil uprising to an armed rebellion, and later a civil war. The rebel Free Syrian Army was created on July 29, 2011. From then on, the struggle took the shape of an armed insurgency, with civil resistance disbanded and opposition members turning to arms."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_upris..._Civil_War
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why is it that ISIS, supposedly the most radical Islamist group the world has ever known, seems to have no interest in attacking Israel, even though they are right next door? I can't even recall them over mentioning Israel in any of their videos/social media blitzes. Could it be they don't want to bite the hand that's feeding them?
If you haven't seen ISIS's threats to Israel you haven't watched or read any of their propaganda. Go download and read an issue of their magazine called, "Dabiq". There are threats to Israel on almost every page. You have to understand their battle plan, which revolves around a bizarre apocalyptic prophecy from the Hadith, in which the Muslim armies will fight the battle of Armageddon at a Syrian city called Dabiq, which will basically kill everyone on the planet except for 5,000 Muslim fighters and will usher in the return of Jesus and judgement day. It sounds really fucking bizarre, but it is no more bizarre than the book of Revelation. Graham Wood wrote an absolutely incredible piece for the Atlantic which basically gives you a cliff's notes version of ISIS's mission statement or business plan. Check it out here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/arch...ts/384980/
I know it makes no sense to you and I, but you have to realize that religion is inherently irrational because it is based on faith, rather than reason and logic. They really believe they are starting the chain of events that will lead to the apocalypse.
So, you can either take the actual words and propaganda of ISIS at face value, or you can take the opinion of QC and Scorpion and just blame the entire thing on a Jewish conspiracy.
Personally, I listen to what the enemy says and take them very seriously. They are telling us what they are going to do and where their motivations come from. ISIS isn't shy and they publicize everything they do, you literally have to ignore reality to think otherwise.
