Expert Analysis

This ISIS beard graveyard signals victory!

ISIS managed to scare the living hell out of the Middle East as well as hand wringing Americans who were terrorized by their own news media, but the war has now turned a corner.  Yes, feast your eyes on this flea ridden pile of Jihadi beards.  A lone Iraqi soldier stands over the beard graveyard in Mosul, where ISIS members shaved before trying to retreat from the battlefield to merge back into the civilian population.  So much for fighting to the death for their so-called caliphate.

I had always maintained on SOFREP that the notion of a powerful ISIS is, and has always been, nothing more than a myth.  The real story isn’t that ISIS is strong, but how weak the regional militaries are who ran away from a bunch of illiterate inbred morons wearing sandals and carrying rusty AK-47’s.  We pumped billions of dollars of “training” into the Iraqi Army over eight or nine years with very little to show for it.

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ISIS managed to scare the living hell out of the Middle East as well as hand wringing Americans who were terrorized by their own news media, but the war has now turned a corner.  Yes, feast your eyes on this flea ridden pile of Jihadi beards.  A lone Iraqi soldier stands over the beard graveyard in Mosul, where ISIS members shaved before trying to retreat from the battlefield to merge back into the civilian population.  So much for fighting to the death for their so-called caliphate.

I had always maintained on SOFREP that the notion of a powerful ISIS is, and has always been, nothing more than a myth.  The real story isn’t that ISIS is strong, but how weak the regional militaries are who ran away from a bunch of illiterate inbred morons wearing sandals and carrying rusty AK-47’s.  We pumped billions of dollars of “training” into the Iraqi Army over eight or nine years with very little to show for it.

About Jack Murphy View All Posts

Jack served as a Sniper and Team Leader in 3rd Ranger Battalion and as a Senior Weapons Sergeant on a Military Free Fall team in 5th Special Forces Group. Having left the military in 2010, he graduated from Columbia with a BA in political science. Murphy is the author of Reflexive Fire, Target Deck, Direct Action, and Gray Matter Splatter. His memoir, "Murphy's Law" is due for a 2019 release and can be pre-ordered now.

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