Latest update on the counts coming from the attack Gweiran prison:
See: Watchdog says 100s of boys missing from Kurdish Syria prison
The count of casualties from the attack on Gweiran prison by ISIL is 40 Kurdish fighters, 77 prison employees and 4 civilians. SDF says that ISIL lost 374 “detainees and attackers.” I assume that means that this figure includes a large number of the people that were already in the prison at the start of the operation. Actual ISIL losses were probably less.
Meanwhile, they are reporting hundreds of boys from the prison are missing. New ISIL recruits?
We did cap the latest leader of ISIL this week. I believe this the second leader of ISIL we have gotten rid of in addition to the leader of Al Queda in Iraq. In my book America’s Modern Wars, we did briefly discuss decapitating insurgencies (pages 151-153). We did not come up with a clear answer. We only had about dozen cases to look at, and of the four we examined in depth, in all cases the insurgency still won. Our conclusions were (page 153): “Now this is not to say we should not go after insurgent leadership when we have the chance. We obviously should. But, it is to stress that you should be careful about giving ‘decapitation’ too much importance as a strategic answer to your counterinsurgent problem.” and “Still, if you have the means to try decapitation, it is important to do so in such a way that you do not kill civilians or give them propaganda tools that they can use. In the end, if you are losing the propaganda war while you are trying to decapitate, then you are working against yourself.”
I do sometimes fear that the U.S. is using decapitation to show we are “combatting the insurgency” as opposed to actually combatting the insurgency.
