Jordanian pilot captured by Isis

[MisterLove]

I'm sure you've seen them by now: the horrific images of the Jordanian pilot captured by Isis.

The photos show Moaz al-Kasasbeh surrounded by his captors, naked and wounded.

I can't stop thinking of him and my only hope is that they realise how important a role the young pilot can play in future negotiations with the coalition forces.

More on this:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/24/world/...aStoryLink

[Rareboy]

Sadly they will kill him.

It has occurred to me that as war has become highly personalized through pictures of humiliation, torture and execution shared in order to scare the 'enemy'....just how far away we are from the vast and anonymous horrors of the First and Second World Wars....when similar scenes were played out but not under the glare of public scrutiny.

Sadly, I suspect that he will become another Isis trophy...but this will only steel the resolve to wipe them without remorse or quibble from the face of the planet....and unfortunately, probably take hundreds of other innocent people along with them as the bombs indiscriminately fall on their positions.

[MisterLove]

[...] Sadly, I suspect that he will become another Isis trophy...but this will only steel the resolve to wipe them without remorse or quibble from the face of the planet....and unfortunately, probably take hundreds of other innocent people along with them as the bombs indiscriminately fall on their positions.

That's the big question here: how on earth do you fight an enemy as elusive as Isis?

In WW2, the nazis were the most powerful army on earth but at least they were clearly identifiable, you knew who the bad guys were and where to get them.

Not so with Isis, you can't just bomb your way out of this.

[BlueStar]

That's the big question here: how on earth do you fight an enemy as elusive as Isis?

In WW2, the nazis were the most powerful army on earth but at least they were clearly identifiable, you knew who the bad guys were and where to get them.

Not so with Isis, you can't just bomb your way out of this.

Agreed. The Nazis never made use of trapped car bombs. If it weren't for a miracle, how could I have saved myself 363 days ago from an explosion by a "normal" man wearing casual clothes in Beirut? And now they are capturing some of our soldiers at the borders with Syria. One does not simply even know they were hit.

The question is not where to find ISIS, but how to get them. A stealth detector might be useful, or a dog...

[Rareboy]

Many of you are very young, so you can't remember when the nature of Warfare changed. Obviously, it changed in WWI with the mechanization of war and then in WWII with the notion of total war. It changed again in the 1960's with Vietnam and Central America and the concept of guerrilla war.

ISIS are fundamentally fighting a medieval tribal warfare strategy in a 21st century conflict. They are not fighting guerrilla style...they appear to believe in traditional full frontal assaults with the use of brute force to tame the locals....

Don't equate or conflate their warfare with the other car bombers or terrorists whose aim is to inflict terror on a civilian population through solo acts. The two things are still quite different. The ISIS attempt to take over a region to establish a geographical caliphate will fail. no one, including Saudi Arabia or Iran will permit this to happen. At the moment, they are letting this play out as another tribal religious conflict....but threaten their actual strategic interests and ISIS would be squashed like a bug.

What ISIS understands is the fearfulness of the west....that we feel the pain of individuals who make good photo ops more than we would care about the news that tens of thousands faceless and nameless people have died in a conflict. Many countries it seems can sit on the sidelines for months while the slaughter of civilians continues unabated....and only rise to outrage when a picture of a single soldier or tourist or journalist being captured and beheaded is blasted into their living rooms by their 24 hour news programmers at least 100 times over the course of a day.

[matty7]

the terrible thing is that they will kill this poor person and the dumbest thing is that that it actually backfires on isis and they cant see it - the governments are not going to stop air strikes suddenly because they hold one pilot, they just don't care enough...but killing him does cause revulsion among the world wide public against them and Muslims everywhere even though the majority of them also find Isis a terrorist group and that Isis are actively murdering other Muslims too who do not follow their version of it...

I saw a picture in our tabloid press of them throwing gay men off high rise building to murder them and stoning them if the fall didn't kill them first - that's probably the sickest thing I have ever seen in my life - but the other perverted thing is in their rules that they pin up everywhere tell how they should handle sex slaves - stating they can take pre pubescent girls and have sex with them as soon as they have bought them - what the fuck ???

[JackTX]

I don't think ISIS is any harder to find than Osama Bin Laden was. Our intelligence is quite good when we apply ourselves. Finding effective points to bomb lots of them (only, hopefully) is probably half the challenge.

Our fear as citizens is probably why we will never elect someone who is truly war-averse, someone who would pull back and stand down. I feel like Obama is trying to play whack-a-mole without getting us in any deeper overall but we're always one crisis away from another engagement. I don't know if WW2 made us this way but we must still see ourselves as world police. With how many bat-shit crazy world leaders there are, I can't even say if that's a bad thing but it definitely comes with its own mess of problems.

There's a chance the guy will make it out alive. I hope he does.

[ShiftyNJ]

What ISIS understands is the fearfulness of the west....that we feel the pain of individuals who make good photo ops more than we would care about the news that tens of thousands faceless and nameless people have died in a conflict. Many countries it seems can sit on the sidelines for months while the slaughter of civilians continues unabated....and only rise to outrage when a picture of a single soldier or tourist or journalist being captured and beheaded is blasted into their living rooms by their 24 hour news programmers at least 100 times over the course of a day.

THIS. We seem to have the idea that one of "ours" is worth much more than a whole village of "theirs" which is not missed by the people of the world. A life is a life.