Map Update: Current Military Situation in Syria’s Aleppo CIty

And spare as many goats as possible.

Black standard below old city is of Ahrar al-Sham, from there clockwise: Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki, FSA, the Sham Legion, two more Ahrar al-Sham, al-Fawj al-Awal, al Zanki, al Awal again, the al Safwa brigade, the Fastaqim Union, two FSA flags.

Well, while religions typically aren’t rational, Wahhabism is an especially irrational flavour. and culture is reflected in military performance and tactics. In general, the more a religion emphasises fatalism, absolute submission to a higher authority, the need to crush dissension with brute force and the irrelevance and sinful, worthless nature of the human being, the less rational the tactics and the lower the overall military performance. Look at the Saudis.

Of course, quite a lot of religions contain aspects of several or all of those, but the degree of prominence and emphasis they receive in each specific religious culture varies. For example, consider that historically, Protestant armies have tended to, on average, outperform Catholic armies by a significant margin. There are individual cases were other cultural and military organizational factors intervened, but in general, that has been true. (And for the record, I’m not Christian at all, so it’s not a matter of personal favouritism.) Protestant countries have also tended to have more efficient administrative organisations than Catholic ones. But, when you compare the differences in flavour, it becomes immediately obvious why: Catholicism places a greater emphasis on fatalism, on the human as a a hopelessly flawed individual, who can only be redeemed by Jesus’ grace, and not by any merit of their own. Protestantism, as summed up in Calvin’s “God helps those that help themselves;” has tended to posit that achieving heavenly status was a matter of merit, that good works and achievement in the mortal world did count for something. Catholicism gives you a free ride to be as ‘sinful’ and useless as you want, because as long as you confess and accept Jesus at the end, you’re good. Protestantism’s emphasis on merit in the material world encourages achievement.

You can see the same thing in Buddhism. In feudal Japan we see that those who subscribed to the esoteric Buddhist sects that emphasised achieving enlightenment through development of mental and spiritual faculties, such as Tendai and Shingon, produced better fighters, with better tactics, higher morale and more initiative than the mainstream Buddhist sects that taught that only many tedious lifetimes of social conformity would work. Sects like Zen (eventually the samurai favourite) which emphasised psychological development, but less rigorously than the total development of Tendai and Shingon, and tended to greater overall fatalism than those two, and Nicherin, which emphasised devotional chanting and active participation in the religious community, occupied a middle rung between the two extremes. Thus, we see the Taira, who followed court Buddhism, performed poorly in the Genpei War against the Minamoto, who were either ambiguous about religion, or who had been raised in monasteries which followed the more esoteric Tendai/Shingon Yamabushi sects. The Minamoto came to adopt Zen as a more Bushido-oriented sect when they achieved power, and also declined some in overall military ability compared to their Genpei War performance. The Ashikaga who displaced them also adopted Zen. The Ikko-Ikki who fought so ferociously against the whole feudal system were an offshoot of Nicherin. The sohei who dominated central Japan until their temples were raised by the pragmatist Oda Nobunaga, and are often regarded as feudal Japan’s foremost warriors, were of the Tendai sect. Ninja were also followers of Tendai and Shingon (and in fact were socially interchangeable with the sohei of those sects, with some living as both), and on those occasions were they chose to deploy on the battlefield, proved considerably superior to run-of-the-mill samurai as warriors (Contrary to the weak but clever assassin stereotype that gaming culture and samurai propaganda has presented.)