Terrorists are the deadly, real life equivalent of trolls. Terrorism is a way to sow conflict, to involve everyone into their war. By now they know from 911 that that's how it works: they don't care if their own side is hurt, as long as it will also end up hurting us — that is, after all, why they suicide: to become martyrs. We have to think of them as being much like a troubled teenager who takes their own life to accuse others in their suicide note. For them, the war is over at that point, and that's why they can no longer lose: they've achieved their only goal of avenging themselves.
Even had I lost a limb in the Paris attacks myself, I would still tell every warmonger that the blame is on them, because they are of the same breed as the attackers, their collaborators in the cycle of violence, and that if they want someone to kill to solve the problem, they needn't look farther than themselves. I would know them to be my real enemy, the same kind of person that would have made such attacks had they been born in the same time and place as the attackers — I'd know because those attacks where themselves a retaliation to France's retaliation to ISIS, which was a retaliation to the US retaliation to 911.
Fifteen years later, revenge still hasn't quelled the violence. How much longer will it take for us to see that this strategy doesn't work? When you look at the map of ISIS territory, and you look at the map of Sunni/Shia distribution, it overlaps almost exactly, and unless the Sunni themselves revolt against ISIS, they're there to stay, because they are there by their leave. The borders can be defended, but you can't defeat the population of a place: you can either kill the entire population or leave them to build their own government.
Whether we like it or not, ISIS is now a sovereign state, and its people will only have a chance at demanding government change when the war is over. Perhaps they'll even have a better chance of doing so than they did in the Arab Spring, as the Iraqis and Syrians failed to overthrow their governments because their Sunni and Shia factions turned against each other before they could do so. For the same reason, the Libyan revolution turned into a civil war, because as soon as NATO was involved it polarized the country's people as pro- and anti-Western, the same way the US polarized Iraq by replacing the Sunni with a Shia government.
We have to ask ourselves what ISIS is hoping to achieve with its terrorism now it knows how this turned out last time. Now that ISIS is starting to become unpopular in Syria, it was only a matter of time before they would lose support, and they wanted to regain sympathy by striking against the West, reminding everyone why they exist. Perhaps they even want the West to retaliate, driving the populace towards them for protection. After all, ISIS only got a chance to exist in the first place because of NATO's invasion of Iraq, a fact of which they must be well aware. They think a holy war is won through martyrdom, and so they want to turn themselves into martyrs by playing David and Goliath. If NATO expands their war to cause more civilian casualties, we're playing right into their hands, and rather than trailing off, ISIS will last at least another decade.
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