W.I. ISIS blows the Mosul Dam?

Ak-84

Banned
I would respectfully disagree in the strongest possible terms, and invite you to take such notions to the political section of the forum.
Its a relevant topic for this thread. Your average Westerner gives two fucks about non-whites. They'll be condemnation and lots of "look how uncivilised these muzzies are" and that is that.

ISIS members are being credited with admirable restraint in this thread also. The reason they did not blow up Mosul Dam was not for altruistic reasons or because of wanting to kill thousands. They are an apocalyptic cult. They have no problems doing what is unadvisable for shits and giggles. Pretty much every oppressor's handbook tells you to avoid wonton killing and taking peoples wives and daughters as sex slaves leads to much stiffer resistance. They did and it did. The reason they did not blow it up was since it would ruin the area they wished to rule and tax and take sex slaves from.
 
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You think Westerners give two fucks about what happends to brown people [del] half a world away[/del] right bloody next door?
While it might not be as horrifying to them if the Aswan Dam was blown, I would say they are both at the point where people are silent, but with eyes and jaws spread open.

Not at all unfounded, considering the history of the last few decades.
If Westerners constantly give hundreds of millions of dollars form their own pockets for disaster victims, those who are hungry, those who are ill, I would say that they wouldn't mind writing a letter to their parliamentary representative.
 
Say Bagdadi has a dream/vision that the destruction of Iraq will force the WESTERN CRUSADERS to descend onto Iraq for the final battle that will pit the true believers against the emissaries of Satan or whatever. Then he thinks he'll be the one person in human history who would invite the coming of God to set the world under Islamic rule, ergo making himself perhaps the most important man ever to exist. All it takes is some meglomania and insanity, something he no doubt fails to lack.
The thing is the Islamic apocalyptic tradition has Armageddon occuring at Dabiq, in Syria, in fact when they captured it they maddca whole hullabaloo about it. For him to start changing basic details of the whole raison d'etre of his movement would be the equivalent of Hitler suddenly preching socialist internationalism.
 
The thing is the Islamic apocalyptic tradition has Armageddon occuring at Dabiq, in Syria, in fact when they captured it they maddca whole hullabaloo about it. For him to start changing basic details of the whole raison d'etre of his movement would be the equivalent of Hitler suddenly preching socialist internationalism.

I meant that the intervention caused by such an atrocity would mean the armies would eventually reach Dabiq where the final showdown of his prophecy would take place. 'Armageddon' is simply the final battle between the forces of good and evil, after all, not 'the end of the world' as such.
 
Its a relevant topic for this thread. Your average Westerner gives two fucks about non-whites. They'll be condemnation and lots of "look how uncivilised these muzzies are" and that is that.

You're wrong here.
Obviously 'the West' cares more about what happens in the West than the rest of the world. This is basic human psychology. If somebody bombed your town, and it received more attention in your town newspaper than a bombing in Baghdad, that would make sense. Because there are greater cultural ties between Western countries than Western countries and non-Western countries, an event that happens in a Western country will get more attention than a comparable event in a non-Western country. If somebody bombed the town next to you... etc. Now, you can argue that people shouldn't; that people should have a completely world-wide perspective. And I agree; but that's just not how the world works. The closer something is to someone, the more important it is to that person.

You are misinterpreting this geographical/cultural distance from the developing world as meaning the "average Westerner gives two fucks about non-whites." The average Westerner, you'll find, is a perfectly regular empathetic human being. The United States and its allies have a long history of intervening in the developing world. Sometimes the motivation is self-protection, but lots of times it is humanitarian. The West wants to do the right thing.
 

trurle

Banned
Or, perhaps ISIL loses control of the Mosul Dam as in OTL, but acquires some Scud and Frog missiles from captured Syrian Army stockpiles. Then, after Mosul is liberated, ISIL launches the missiles at the Mosul Dam, causing enough damage to breach the dam and unleashing the flood upon ISIL's enemies.* I don't know how plausible this second scenario might be - I don't know if the warheads on Scud or Frog missiles could deal enough damage to open up the dam.
Both Scud (1-ton warhead) or Frog (0.4 ton warhead) are inadequate to collapse a large dam. Also, both systems had accuracy issues requiring tens of missiles to be launched to strike the dam at least one time.
 
One thing they could have done would have been to booby trap the dam with demolition charges as a contingency for if Mosul looked like falling.
 
Devastating consequences will happen. For sure ISIS would be gone, but what about the worse humanitarian crisis created as a result of the dam being blown up.

It would mean the death of the central government and making Iraq more like Somalia in the 1990's. (near anarchy)
 
Devastating consequences will happen. For sure ISIS would be gone, but what about the worse humanitarian crisis created as a result of the dam being blown up.

It would mean the death of the central government and making Iraq more like Somalia in the 1990's. (near anarchy)
Yeah, there would certainly be outbreaks of warlordism.
 
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