June 12 - A Military assessment of ISIS's Lightening Offensive; ISIS's Ambitious Map of an Islamic Caliphate; Sebastian Junger Discuss his Latest Film Korengal

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the lightning speed with which major Iraqi cities are falling to fighters with ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and assess the military situation on the ground in Iraq with a former intelligence officer in the U.S. Army in Iraq, Jessica Lewis, the Research Director at the Institute for the Study of War who is the Institute’s lead analyst with their al Qaeda portfolio and the author of Al-Qaeda in Iraq Resurgent, Parts 1 and 11. We discuss the likelihood of the Sunni jihadists blowing up Shiite shrines to inflame the conflict further and the amount of military equipment falling into the hands of ISIS as the U.S. evacuates its personnel from the Balad air base just north of Baghdad.

Part 2

Then James Gelvin, a professor of History at UCLA who is a specialist on the Middle East, particularly Greater Syria, the area of present day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, joins us. We discuss the Syrian as well as the Iraq dimension to the explosion of ISIS onto the world stage and how much the ambitious maps that ISIS displays will come to fruition as they try to impose their Islamic caliphate on the region.

Part 3

Then finally, Sebastian Junger joins us in the studio to discuss his latest feature documentary Korengal, the sequel to Academy-Award-nominated Restrepo. He is the best-selling author of “The Perfect Storm”, “A Death in Belmont” and “War” and we discuss his and the late Tim Hetherington’s 10 months spent with a group of American soldiers in a remote mountain outpost under constant Taliban attacks and how the war in Afghanistan effects the soldiers on the front line.