That&#x27;s why I specified the difference with expeditionary vs insurgency&#x2F;local civil war-ish kinds of attacks. Examining ISIS as an insurgency or a civil war (as you hit on with the Yugoslavia comparison especially) has a lot more explanatory power than as a terrorist group.<p>In this sense I mean terrorist group not as a moral distinction, but as a structural and methodological one. Terrorist group in the sense I mean doesn&#x27;t really hold territory like ISIS does; they hit civilian targets in order to sway those citizens&#x27; governments, not to intimidate them into accepting their own governance; they are not governments.<p>Once you control lots of territory where people live you&#x27;ll get all sorts of people joining. The reasons people join transnational terrorist groups are very different than the reasons people join murderous super-rapey governments in the middle of a civil war.<p>Even if it feels emotionally correct to call ISIS terrorists it&#x27;s not the best way to analyze them and I think it&#x27;s part of the reason that our policies and doctrines regarding terrorism, nation-building, foreign intervention are so schizophrenic.