Insurgent Tactics Quotes

Military strikes on Afghanistan will not prevent something this terrible from happening again, for the simple reason that bombs will not deter people who are unafraid of death and desire martyrdom.

Some of the generals are saying, 'We're making progress. We are clearing an area.' But you really don't defeat the Taliban by clearing an area. They move.

An insurgency is the most difficult to fight of all military activities.

In counterinsurgency operations, the human terrain is the decisive terrain.

You can't talk about defeating insurgencies in the same way that you can with a conventional army.

Not all of the Islamic State killers are going to die on the battlefield.

Terror breeds terror. I am completely opposed to both state terror and those who respond in a similar way. There is no justification for any group that associates itself with the Left to kill innocents and encourage suicide bombings.

By the end of 2008, clearly the Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgency had been relatively stabilized. And in the Al Qaeda's mind, they were defeated.

The seditious Bolivar has occupied Santa Fe, and the fateful result of that battle has placed at his disposition the whole kingdom and the immense resources of a very populated country, rich and abundant from which he will plunder what he needs to continue the war in these provinces because the insurgents have no rules or inhibitions

ISIS is on its way to defeat but terrorism threat persists.

When I see Bin Laden with his AK-47, I got nervous. But what can I do, terrorists aren't fools: they too chose the most reliable guns.

We cleared many of their towns and cities and rural areas of al-Qaida Iraq and other insurgents.

The fight against radical Islamic terrorists and ISIS has been called the war of our time.

You want to be a terrorist, you go to Iraq. It's like Harvard.

We remember the grind of the insurgency -- the roadside bombs, the sniper fire, the suicide attacks. From the 'triangle of death' to the fight for Ramadi; from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south -- your will proved stronger than the terror of those who tried to break it.

We cannot kill or capture our way out of an industrial-strength insurgency.

The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality--counter-moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical.

If you look at the current Mosul campaign against ISIL, for example the few thousand troops that we have there to support that effort allows the Iraqi military to move forward in an effective way.

It's getting tougher and tougher to defeat ISIS, because they're in more and more places, more and more states, more and more nations.

The terrorists know that the outcome will leave them emboldened or defeated. So they are waging a campaign of murder and destruction. And there is no limit to the innocent lives they are willing to take.

To crush an insurgency you have to have political support from the society in which the insurgency operates.

With the exception of weapons of mass destruction, there is no other type of attack that is more effective than suicide terrorism. The perception is that it's impossible to guard against.

When I first raised the issue of the so-called Islamic State at the Munich Security Conference in February, speaking about its economy, its flexibility and pathology, people thought I was trying to scare them. But now we have experienced just that. If al-Qaida was version 2.0 of terror, then the Islamic State is version 5.0.

Moreover, I would like to say that the sort of polar inertia we witnessed in the Kosovo War, the polar inertia involving 'automated war' and 'war-at-a-distance' is also terribly weak in the face of terrorism. For instance, in such situations, any individual who decides to place or throw a bomb can simply walk away. He or she has the freedom to move. This also applies to militant political groups and their actions.

Al Qaeda has been placed on the run, but not destroyed.