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Comment by clock_tower | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it would've been very different. There would have probably been an Islamist insurgency in that region anyways (Sunnis in arms, especially against secular rulers, tend to be Islamist these days), and it would've probably been about equal to ISIS in ability: less of ISIS' evil "star power", but more military ability since they wouldn't have everyone on the planet bombing them.

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You say there would have been an insurgency anyway, but daesh was precisely the insurgency that formed from the conditions that made it favorable for such an insurgency to form. These ideologies always exist in a latent form, but they take socioeconomic upheaval to turn into a self sustaining rupture in the political order. The United States both in the short term and the long term has incubated these movements with its ill planned policies and wars.

Like, coordinating coups and dropping bombs over and over again tends to have that effect.

DAESH/ISIS didn't form in the civil war; they renamed themselves that, but they already existed as al-Qaida in Iraq. A native east-Syrian Islamist insurgency would probably have been more benign; they certainly wouldn't have had eight years of war with the US to refine their tactics, write The Management of Savagery, develop a webzine, and so on.

There are many factions in the Syrian civil war, not just Assad and ISIS. I'm sure many an ISIS fighter would just join another faction, e.g. Al Qaeda affiliates, had ISIS not arisen.

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