--- title: Why the U.S. Should Not Send Troops to Fight ISIS description: The group was, after all, spawned by the occupation of Iraq canonical: https://time.com/3723617/dont-take-the-bait-the-u-s-should-not-send-troops-to-fight-isis/ author: Karl Vick article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-02-26T11:17:33.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:59:48.858Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Why the U.S. Should Not Send Troops to Fight ISIS og:description: The group was, after all, spawned by the occupation of Iraq og:url: https://time.com/3723617/dont-take-the-bait-the-u-s-should-not-send-troops-to-fight-isis/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why the U.S. Should Not Send Troops to Fight ISIS twitter:description: The group was, after all, spawned by the occupation of Iraq twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # Don’t Take the Bait: The U.S. Should Not Send Troops to Fight ISIS > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: The Families ISIS Fighters Leave Behind [Watch (HLS stream): The Families ISIS Fighters Leave Behind](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/3wE4zvGL.m3u8) (5:29)  _Published 2015-02-26. How the rivalry between ISIS & Al-Nusra is tearing families apart_  by [Karl Vick](https://time.com/author/karl-vick/)  ## Karl Vick Editor at Large Feb 26, 2015 11:17 AM UTC  by [Karl Vick](https://time.com/author/karl-vick/)  ## Karl Vick Editor at Large Feb 26, 2015 11:17 AM UTC In December 2001, when the war on terrorism was only weeks old, victory appeared at hand with the fall of Kandahar, the southern Afghanistan city Osama bin Laden had called home. Now that the question is how best to confront a fresh horror, it’s worth noting that the city was taken not by U.S. troops but by the same tag team that liberated the rest of the country: scruffy Afghan militias advancing in pickup trucks behind U.S. air strikes. As Christmas approached, there couldn’t have been more than 50 Americans in town, most of them Special Forces so at home in local clothes that they were easier to spot by the bumper stickers on their pickups: I ♥ NY. The rest of us were reporters haunting public venues like the central market, where one morning I noticed a man standing apart. He wore a black turban and a knowing look, both markers of the Taliban, and had a question. “Why didn’t you come on the ground?” he said. “It would have been lovely if you came on the ground.” I knew what he meant, but not nearly as viscerally as I did two years later, in Iraq, where we came on the ground. Why we came at all is a bit of a mystery, but it was pretty clear pretty early that our physical presence created its own reality, armored up yet vulnerable both to labels–“occupier” at best, but also “crusader”–and constant ambush. “If you’re trying to win hearts and minds,” a Marine major told me in Najaf, “maybe sending 100,000 19-year-olds with machine guns isn’t the best way to go about it.” Not massing U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 9/11 was a masterstroke, even if it came about mainly because the Pentagon lacked a ready war plan for the country that had sheltered bin Laden. It’s not just that Afghanistan has a way of swallowing armies. (Ask the British; ask the Russians.) There is an essential elegance to using what the military calls standoff weapons in a fight made infinitely more difficult by your actual presence. Which is why it’s fortunate that Americans have shown little appetite for a large-scale ground war against ISIS. The group was, after all, spawned by the occupation of Iraq. Many of its leaders are veterans of the U.S. military prisons that turned out to double as universities for jihad. But their aim is no longer to expel the invader. Just the opposite. Now they want to lure us in. The fundamentalist narrative embraced by ISIS calls for a return of U.S. forces to Iraq, modern legionnaires fulfilling the role of “Rome” in the end-time narrative the group believes it has set in motion. It’s a millennialist vision as complicated as the Book of Revelation, but the U.S. role is pretty simple: show up. For anyone seeking a logic behind the gruesome decapitations of American journalists and aid workers, there it is–provoke a reaction. The bloodletting does summon the associations of terrorism, barbarity and peril that have beset Americans for more than a decade now. But associations are almost all they are. To date, ISIS has demonstrated no particular ambition to attack the West at home. (That remains the raison d’être of al-Qaeda, whose Syria affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra harbors the elite al-Qaeda bombmakers dubbed the Khorasan group.) ISIS eyes another prize. Having declared a caliphate on the river valleys and desert land it has conquered in Syria and Iraq, it aims to turn the clock back to the 7th century. It functions both as a government and as a sectarian killing machine, slaughtering Shi’ites and many others in the name of purification. To retain its sense of inevitability, however, ISIS must expand–something it’s been unable to do in Iraq since U.S. air strikes began in August. Recent growth, such as it is, has all been virtual, via pledges of fealty from existing jihadi groups in Sinai, Libya and other ungoverned dots on the map. The mother ship itself is hemmed in. Shi’ites and Kurds man the bulwarks to the east. To the west lie Syrian state forces that ISIS–nominally a rebel group–has mostly left alone. What to do? The U.S. clearly has a national interest in preserving Iraq. (We broke it; we bought it.) But sending Americans back into Anbar and Saladin provinces would provide ISIS with pure oxygen and fresh waves of volunteers, while feeding the narrative that the U.S. is in a war against Islam. We have the planes, but this looks like a fight for guys in pickups who want to take their own country back. Vick is a TIME editor at large and was previously the Jerusalem bureau chief ## Transcript [ NOISE ] The war in Syria is three years old. And it's spilling over into neighboring countries across the Middle East. Fighters from around the world are pouring into Iraq and Syria to join the ranks of ISIS. In this storyTye meets with family members who claim their sons have joined military groups like Isis and the [ UNKNOWN ] front. All families interviewed for this story are Kurdish. Kurds represent about 18 % of the Turkish population. While most Kurds are fighting against Islamic militants these families have seen their brothers and sons go off to war in the opposite camp. Fighting side by side with ISIS in the Al Nasser front. The stigma these families now face makes them weary of speaking on camera, but these interviews are a rare glimpse of the growing tension in the region as ISIS widens its reach. [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ]. [ FOREIGN ] He grew up as any other child would coming from a small village. He was sent to a boarding school because we were a poor family. Then at nineteen he became a martyr. He went to places where they developed his ideas and brainwashed him. [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ]. He met some guys that made him pray in a different way from others. They made him believe that if he goes to fight, they made him swear to be like them. And told him that if he does, that he will go to heaven and so will the rest of his family. [ FOREIGN ]. > They took him away from me. They knew that if they took him there he would die. They didn't care. He was against Assad and he went there to help his Muslim brothers. The war had not spread to Iraq at that point. After he died it got messier. I tried to convince him not to go. But he didn't want to change his mind. He wasn't a bad person. > He wasn't a bad person. ( foreign singing ). [ FOREIGN ]. [ FOREIGN ] The problem with Syria is that Assad has been killing people for many years now. But now these people are waking up and realizing what the West offered is just poverty, [ FOREIGN ] But now these people are waking up and realizing what the West offered is just poverty, drugs, tears, suffering. We believe that wherever there is violence, the responsibility comes from the West. [ MUSIC ] He went there because he had been arrested once before. And the government was going to arrest him again. He was going to be arrested for theft, that was one of the reasons he left. [ FOREIGN ] He was going to be arrested for theft. That was one of the reasons he left. [ MUSIC ] [ FOREIGN ]. All families interviewed for the story come from southeastern Anatolia, but more families across Europe and the United States are seeing their loved ones leave for war. Just recently, three British school girls were believed to be travelling to Syria to join ISIS. As Smith suggests that more than 3, 000 Europeans have travelled to Syria and Iraq since 2000. Fourteen, representing roughly one quarter of the foreign fighters in the region. For these families, often cut off from their sons and brothers, questions linger. Why did their loved ones leave them behind? 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