immigrantscanada.com

Independent topical source of current affairs, opinion and issues, featuring stories making news in Canada from immigrants, newcomers, minorities & ethnic communities' point of view and interests.

Drive Isis: Sunni Muslims and Al Qaeda

drive isis: The grueling 4 1/2-year campaign to drive ISIS from the territories it once held has left entire towns and neighbourhoods in ruins, in both war-torn Syria and Iraq, according to CTV. If the long-standing grievances of Sunni Muslims in both countries continue to fester, the extremists could rise again. ------ WHAT HAS ENDED EXACTLY What is over is the Islamic State group's physical caliphate, after the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led group supported by the United States, declared on Saturday the capture of the last tiny patch of territory controlled by the militants, in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz. But ISIS, which traces its roots back to the bloody emergence of al Qaeda in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, has survived past defeats and is already waging a low-level insurgency in areas it was driven from months or even years ago. That domain once stretched over large parts of Syria and Iraq, which the group conquered in a blitz in the summer of 2014, capturing towns and cities, including Mosul, Iraq's second-largest. At its height, the territory was the size of Britain, stretching from near the northern Syrian town of Aleppo to the outskirts of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and home to 8 million people. The fighters bulldozed berms along the border and proclaimed a contiguous caliphate stretching across a third of both countries. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.