[Deleted. Off topic.]

There seem to be many major differences between ISIS' attack on Kobane and the German attack on Stalingrad.

The Germans had put huge numbers into the battle for Stalingrad, close to half a million, the bulk of their forces in Russia. The Russians surrounded the German forces, in about this week in 1942 and used the winter to degrade the Nazis, until they surrendered in January 1943. Nobody is talking about surrounding the ISIS forces outside of Kobane. And they would have put only a fraction of their forces there, up till now.

As well, ISIS soldiers don't care if they are killed - each one probably has his 72 virgins already marked out. Unless they are killed by one of those wonderful, incredibly brave, Kurdish women, of course. I don't think that Nazi soldiers were all that eager to die, even if 72 Aryan goddesses awaited each one.

As Spindoc says, there are differences between tactics and strategy. The Germans based so much of their strategy on capturing Stalingrad and getting access to the Baku oil-fields, they had no Plan B; while Kobane probably represents only a tactical manoeuvre by ISIS: they can retreat any time, and rapidly - thanks to 1400 Humvees captured at Mosul - shift their forces to menace Kirkuk or Baghdad. In a horrible sense, ISIS may have a multitude of Plan Bs.

ISIS may still have the offensive edge: the Nazis at Stalingrad may have been at their last offensive gasp. ISIS forces have many options, seizing territory and destroying city after city will mean nothing to them. Dying will mean nothing to them.

Somebody is bound to know better than me whether or not the Islamist-fascist philosophy depicts human activity and achievements such as the building of cities and dams and infrastructure as some sort of abomination against Allah. Their Allah is a god of total destruction of all human creations, in preparation not for bringing his world down to Earth, but for destroying an ignoble creation and bringing his most faithful up to paradise. And to the arms of those virgins.

Joe

The ultimate glory in ISIS is dying in the cause of Allah. They will never surrender as that is a sign of weakness.

Loudmouth,

I think that both you and Joe have over estimated the willingness to die of the ISIS forces. This is not borne out by past experiences.

The Germans were also fighting on the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad, and the 500 000 troops committed to Stalingrad were a small portion of the several million troops in Russia and more in Europe.

The whole ISIS contingent is estimated to be 30 000 of which several thousand are tied down in Kobane, and losses are estimated at over 600 men in the first month, with a considerable number of vehicles armoured and otherwise. While this may be seen as chump change compared the slaughter at Stalingrad, the losses at Kobane are more than 10x that at Mosul, and roughly 2% loss of one's entire force in few weeks.

This of course excludes the forces committed in numerous other areas also being pounded by the coalition forces and losing men and equipment.

Stalingrad has been given far greater significance in the war in the east since the war ended than it really had during the period of hostiliites.
There were much bigger and more devastating battles, such as at Kiev and the German defeat at Moscow was the real psychological turning point in the war, Stalingrad was just harder for Goebbels to censor and spin because they'd built it up in the minds of the public much as the allies had done with Tobruk, Guadalcanal or Kokoda .
Operation Barbarossa "was" WW2, the other theatres were sideshows in comparison, for example Romania suffered almost as many casualties as the U.S.A and U.K combined and the Russian and German losses were utterly staggering.
Hitler kicked a hornet's nest and paid the price, his intelligence services estimated the Soviet military strength at 30 divisions when it was closer to 300 and they had no idea of the massive industrial capacity available to Stalin or what total mobilisation of the Soviet economy could achieve.
ISIS on the other hand are guerillas fighting within populations which are largely sympathetic to their goals or who at least stay out of their way, the Germans lost somewhere in the order of half a million men to partisan activity but ISIS are able to recruit willing fighters from their captured zones.

But here's a dreadfully depressing thought: sooner or later, there may be a major response against ISIS and Salafism from 'ordinary' Muslims, BUT not necessarily in a progressive way. Reaction may come in ways that are even more reactionary, backward, and insular/parochial than ISIS can manage, harking back to a mythical past. Not so much Islamist fascism, more as a sort of cultural Arabist tribal fascism.

Maybe the only hope for anything progressive in the Middle East, moving towards Enlightenment thinking (equality, the rule of law, rationality, scepticism), will come from women rather than men (especially educated women), non-Arabs (Kurds, especially), Shia rather than Sunni, and Middle East Christians rather than Muslims.

The Marxist still in me says that, since there isn't any real working class, or industrialisation on a large scale across the Middle East, the class structure is dominated by peasants, petty-bourgeois and bureaucrats, and there isn't much progressive in that lot.

So yeah, maybe this will be a much more complicated, to-and-fro see-saw between secular dictatorships and reversion to Islamism, throughout this century ?

So depressing.