Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
So when I Google how many Hamas fighters are in Gaza it looks like 20,000. When I search how many Isis fighters were killed it is about 1000. So let’s say there were 2000 total. And they weren’t embedded in hospitals etc.
And Israel and the U.S. aren’t using our soldiers to be dumped off a DDay boat and charge at machine guns anymore, so I’m not sure your approach really is reality. But who knows.
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Huh? There were multiple operations against ISIS that killed more than 1,000 - you can start here for a list of operations, and click through to some to see deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._Islamic_State Do a little more googling, or even read some wikipedia, I think you'll see estimates of fighting strength for ISIS of up to a quarter million fighters, including units taken relatively intact from Hussein's armed forces that included traditionally trained (even by the US Army) military commanders as well as guerrilla forces.
Of course, if you're counting deaths of ISIS you also have to draw the line somewhere as to when al Qaeda in the Iraq/Syria area morphs into ISIS (e.g., that will exclude things like Falluja, an undoubted part of the war on terror but before the morph). It also looks like that list doesn't include ISIS deaths at the hands of, say, Syria or Turkey. Those countries actually played a pretty big role in the defeat of ISIS (though in Assad's case often replacing it with something pretty objectionable in its own right).
In general, you'll also find that the ratio of civilian deaths to ISIS deaths was sub 1:1 through most of the war on terror; it you believe the numbers that are being attributed to Israeli military sources, it's looking like the ratio in Gaza is significantly higher than 10:1 and maybe as high as 20:1; numbers from UN sources are pretty close to that 20:1 figure. That's what will create your future Hamas members and that's what the US military and Biden administration are getting much more worried about.
Hamas is a smaller, less well organized, and less well funded operation than ISIS was, whatever your googling says.
Besides those actual campaigns, though, a lot of deaths of key figures in ISIS were one-off special forces operations or police actions by the local country.
By the way, if you want the best comparison to Israel's strategy against Hamas, it is Assad's strategy against his opponents - lost of arial bombing, relatively little use of special forces, a disregard for civilian losses (though Israel is racking up civilian kills at a rate that significantly exceeds Assad's) and a willingness to use collective punishment. And that strategy has not worked well for Assad, while he is generally viewed as having "won" his civil war, he is still not in control of some parts of Syria and a very large part of Syria is only tenuously under his control.
