ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: The Knights Templar Maps a Plan to Fight ISIS and Win.
The only successes against ISIS have come at the hands of expressly ethno-sectarian troops—not states you could identify on a Google map: the Shiite militias and Iranian advisors that accompany the Iraqi army into battle, the Alawi Syrians and their Hezbollah allies, or the Kurds fighting, with a wink, for the Iraqi state. Even the first time ISIS was defeated, in 2007-2008, it was by expressly sectarian Sunni militias in Anbar, not by the Iraqi army.
There is no state army winning in the Middle East; nor, really, against radical Islam elsewhere, which has exploded since 2001. . . .
ISIS has arisen to fill that gap, but something else will arise to push back against it, since states cannot. That something won’t be the Templars, exactly, but it will also not be a state. It will instead be new non-state networks to funnel money and fighters against ISIS.
There are already reports of Americans and other Westerners going to join the Kurdish militias; how long before the Christian communities in Iraq and other ethno-sectarian communities under assault begin to attract adherents as well?
The war against ISIS and radical Islam may not always be state versus non-state, but perhaps eventually non-state versus non-state. Popularized violence and popularized sovereignty; more efficient, certainly, to cut out the middleman.
Hmm. Maybe we can start a Kickstarter?
Related: Vatican To Clear Knights Templar After 700 Years. Hmm. Curious timing, that.
Meanwhile, note that this sectarian-violence phenomenon does not represent an improvement in the human condition: Christians Have Destroyed Almost All the Mosques In the Central African Republic. It is, rather, a symptom of the failure of our feckless international system to promote civilized values and ordered liberty.