Convicted military intelligence leaker Chelsea Manning has written an op-ed piece from prison warning that military force alone cannot stop advances by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Manning – who was convicted last year on espionage and other charges after providing a large number of classified documents to the WikiLeaks whistleblowing site – wrote the opinion piece in The Guardian.
“The Islamic State is without question a very brutal extremist group with origins in the insurgency of the United States occupation of Iraq,” she wrote from her cell at Fort Leavenworth.
“Based on my experience as an all-source analyst in Iraq during the organization’s relative infancy, ISIS cannot be defeated by bombs and bullets – even as the fight is taken to Syria, even if it is conducted by non-western forces with air support.”
The former U.S. military intelligence analyst suggested that the best way to defeat ISIS is to contain the militant group and then let it eventually fail as a result of its own blunders.
“Let ISIS succeed in setting up a failed ‘state’ - in a contained area and over a long enough period of time to prove itself unpopular and unable to govern,” she writes.
The world needs to be “disciplined enough to let the ISIS fire die out on its own,” according to Manning. “This is certainly a lot to ask for. But ISIS is wielding a sharp, heavy and very deadly double-edged sword. Now just wait for them to fall on it.”
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