Our young enemies

From having read an email from Foreign Policy this morning, noted is that a 31-year-old Turki al-Binali is ready to become ISIS chief mufti. Mufti means the head scholar in the vernacular of Islam.

At any rate, the entire U.S. military establishment led by well-schooled and educated leaders are up against these relatively younger people. This instance demonstrates how terrorists of lesser might can put the world's greatest armies up against the ropes. In the long run, they may not win the battles. However, there may be no winners of the war until or unless the terms are more clearly defined.

The battle for hearts and minds is about providing sustainable economies and sufficient upward mobile opportunities for those who prepare themselves to address it. Such preparation comes from the support of communities and their governments.

In the absence of functioning, attentive, and effective governments, the vacuum may be filled by undesirable entities that include radicalized terrorists and extremists. Terrorism is a symptom of the problem that is from dysfunctional government and the absence of sustainable economies.

"By Paul McLeary with Adam Rawnsley 

Messaging. Operating under the assumption that Islamic State’s chief of operations and propaganda, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, was indeed killed in an airstrike earlier this week, the race is on to figure out who might replace him. A team over at the New York Times identifies two men: Turki al-Binali, a 31 year-old senior ISIS cleric who is believed to be the group’s chief mufti, and Abu Luqman, also known as Ali Mousa Al-Shawwakh, who was the first ISIS-installed ruler of Raqqa and one of the group’s chief Syria strategists. He’s also older than Binali, having worked as a recruiter for jihadists back in the early days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003." 

Foreign Policy

'The millennial ISIS preacher radicalizing the next generation of jihadis'
The New York Post