MUSLIM WORLD - ISIL Megalomaniac Leader Mirrors the Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge

This is dangerous, very dangerous to the U.S. and the world.  You can bet-the-farm that they will not stop with just Iraq.

Their leader is definitely a megalomaniac, who has declared he wants the Muslim World to follow his leadership.

"Beyond Iraq, what’s next for the Islamic State?" PBS NewsHour 8/10/2014

Excerpt

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  For more about this we are joined once again tonight from Washington by Douglas Ollivant.  He is a Senior and National Securities Studies Fellow at the New America Foundation and a partner at Mantid International.

So this might be a semantic question, we’ve referred to them as militants, as fighters, as jihadists, but considering some of the brutality that we are hearing reports of essentially burying people alive in mass graves and indiscriminately shooting them, it seems that these people are different.

DOUGLAS OLLIVANT:  They are different.  They are Islamist terrorists, they are Islamic fighters, but there is this core brutality to them, (that reminds us of Khmer Rouge like extermination), their tactics, their terror, the destruction of cultural heritage, the rape, the slave markets we hear, the burying alive.

We haven’t heard any stories of crucifixions in Iraq but certainly we’ve seen it in Syria by this group.  The Islamic State of Iraq in Syria, or ISIL or the Islamic State, whatever you prefer to call them, they are something very different than what we’ve seen before.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  And they’ve been very clear about exactly who they want to target and even the geographic area of what they want, I mean, this is the caliphate and empire that they want to resurrect.

DOUGLAS OLLIVANT:  Right, well they declared the Islamic State a few weeks ago so now evidently they think they rule all Muslim areas from the west end of East Africa and Spain all the way to Indonesia.

But even before that they were the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and when you look at a map of the Levant, they’re very clear; they want Jordan, they want Lebanon, they want Israel, the northern part of Saudi Arabia, the southern part of Turkey.  They’re very clear about their war aims.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  And you know the French foreign minister had a quote that was in the press release he said “We’re not fighting a terrorist organization we’re fighting a terrorist state.”  So does that change how the international community responds to this?

DOUGLAS OLLIVANT:  I think it absolutely has to, that’s absolutely right.  This is no longer a terrorist safe haven within a state, it’s a de facto state that is a terrorist safe haven.

And again, given the brutality of this group and their clear, long-term aims, we do need to take this seriously.  Now right now they’re focused on what they call the near enemy–the Maliki and the Assad regimes but this turn up to the Kurds in the northeast demonstrates that that’s not all they’re focused on.

Today it was Kurdistan, if I were Jordan or Lebanon, I’d be very concerned.