That's why I specified the difference with expeditionary vs insurgency/local civil war-ish kinds of attacks. Examining ISIS as an insurgency or a civil war (as

That's why I specified the difference with expeditionary vs insurgency/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. 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't really hold territory like ISIS does; they hit civilian targets in order to sway those citizens' governments, not to intimidate them into accepting their own governance; they are not governments. Once you control lots of territory where people live you'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. Even if it feels emotionally correct to call ISIS terrorists it's not the best way to analyze them and I think it's part of the reason that our policies and doctrines regarding terrorism, nation-building, foreign intervention are so schizophrenic.