Summary
I doubt that this scenario will play itself out, because when confronted with a strong combination of Arab, Iranian and Western military forces on the ground and in the air, which I expect to happen in the year ahead, ISIS will be rolled back and probably shattered.
This requires acknowledging the many bad things that repel young Arabs from their own societies. Defeating ISIS by trying to interrupt its flow of recruits will not work, as long as conditions in Arab societies remain so offensive and distasteful that they push some citizens to leave and join ISIS.
Those thousands of young men from many Arab countries that join ISIS and engage in its criminal activities are the shredded shirts, broken bottles and rotting food of the Arab garbage heap of modern citizenship that has built up over the last half century or so of domestic Arab governance systems.
That ISIS in the eyes of its adherents is an attractive alternative to existing Arab systems is the latest red flag warning that those Arab systems need radical reform and wholesale restructuring.
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