Beirut: First France and then Russia answered Islamic State attacks on their citizens with a strategy of direct reprisal: intensified airstrike campaigns on Raqqa, the militants' de facto capital in Syria. But in the early hours of those new campaigns, there seemed to be more questions than decisive results. Chief among them: Why, if there were confirmed IS targets that could be hit without killing civilians, were they not hit more heavily long ago? And what, in fact, was being hit? More broadly, the Raqqa airstrikes are renewing a debate about how effective such attacks can be in defeating or containing the IS, without more commitment to measures like drying up its financial support,...
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