Top 74 Insurgency Quotes & Sayings

I never call it an insurgency. I call it terrorism.

I think the central mission in Afghanistan right now is to protect the people, certainly, and that would be inclusive of everybody, and that in a, in an insurgency and a counterinsurgency, that's really the center of gravity.

The Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al Qaeda in Iraq are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.

Very unusual in an insurgency to have absolutely no political agenda other than to return to power. Most insurgents have a political side to them.

Our aim is always to minimise casualties and to separate a hardline Taliban from those who have been caught up in the insurgency.

All the way back to Dartmouth, I was part of the insurgency.

Military leaders, many of whom were students of counterinsurgency, recognized the dangers of an incremental escalation and the historical lesson that 'trailing' an insurgency typically condemned counterinsurgents to failure.

In any insurgency there will be people who are irreconcilable and who pose a clear and present threat to the U.S. and our allies.

The number of attacks on the American and allied forces is at the highest level since the insurgency began despite the increase of America combat operations and the introduction of some 40 new Iraq security forces and battalions.

But what counter-insurgency really comes down to is the protection of the capitalists back in America, their property and their privileges. U.S. national security, as preached by U.S. leaders, is the security of the capitalist class in the US, not the security of the rest of the people.

The war in Afghanistan is too important to be reduced to a political football. We are fighting there to protect our national security. We are confronting the Taliban-led insurgency to prevent terrorists returning to that country.

I don't know how you defeat an insurgency unless you have some handle on the number of people that you are facing.

Its the reality of a situation like this that when you have a large troop presence that it has the tendency to fuel the insurgency, because they can make the incorrect and unfair claim that somehow the United States is here to occupy this country, which of course is not true.

With no other security forces on hand, U.S. military was left to confront, almost alone, an Iraqi insurgency and a crime rate that grew worse throughout the year, waged in part by soldiers of the disbanded army and in part by criminals who were released from prison.

We must support initiatives that provide clear, concrete measures and milestones that our troops need for defeating the insurgency, building up Iraqi security forces, and handing over Iraq to the Iraqi people.

One of the most ignored dimensions of the Iraqi insurgency are the Iraqis themselves who are regularly abducted, held for ransom and sometimes executed.

The senior director at the NSC for the Middle East is retired Col. Derek Harvey, an Arabic-speaking intelligence officer with a Ph.D. who served as the head of the U.S. military cell examining the insurgency in Iraq in 2003.

The word 'insurgency' had connotations that really sent a shiver down the spine of folks in Washington, in the United States - for good reason, because it means this is something much bigger than just a few terrorist cells.

One of the most missed components of the entire insurgency in Iraq was that Syria and Bashar al-Assad facilitated Al Qaeda's operations in Iraq. They actually headquartered the Iraq Ba'ath Party and all of their escaped generals in Damascus.

The country [Afghanistan] faces enormous problems. There is a violent insurgency hampering the rule of law and developmental efforts.

Almost all Iraqis with any previous experience in the intelligence business are Sunni Arab, increasing the risk of penetration of the new intelligence apparatus by the insurgency.

In a country like Iraq with its culture of blood feuds - is that the more locals are killed, the more motivation there is for the insurgency, for the insurgents the more feelings of revenge there are, and in the end the more the operational security of the soldiers suffers, because any soldier who kills an infant today is grooming the killer of his mate tomorrow.

Rather than bring peace and harmony, the EU will cause insurgency and violence.

Counter-insurgency, as you know, is a roller-coaster affair.

[ Republican Party] is correctly described as a "radical insurgency" by one of the leading conservative commentators, Norman Ornstein.

I made this bad joke on Twitter saying, "I want to put in my first no-bid contract to train the Libyan army and police force." These counter-insurgency guys like to say, "We don't do the big F-16 or big boondoggle projects, we're not pulling this stuff because it's good business." But in fact it turns out there are tons of business opportunities involving counter-insurgency operations - and it's not like we're getting rid of the boondoggle programs either, we're just doing more of everything.

As many have noted, Donald Trump's presidency is an insurgency. Mr. Trump himself is the quintessential insurgent, doing battle with a disingenuous and entrenched establishment.

Our troops shouldn't be mired in taking land for the Afghan military, providing force protection and fighting a permanent insurgency.

Three years into the war, tens of thousands of American troops remain targets of a growing Iraqi insurgency.

Who's the big government guy? These labels are nonsense. And the Tea Party, if you want to call them working class, you know, a working-class insurgency from below, they are a mass of contradictions; they don't have a single consistent viewpoint; but part of their impulse is to be wary of government.

Kennedy saw the insurgency as a anti-colonial, essentially nationalist movement, feeding on social discontent. So you don't shoot people.

We don't know if our economy, our society, could support the social and the human and the economic cost of an insurgency.

[In response to the question "Do you think that you underestimated the insurgency's strength?"] I think so. I guess if I look back on it now, I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered.

The Government of Iraq also owes a debt to the American and coalition forces who are fighting the insurgency and helping put that country back together after decades of repression.

The most stupid mistake a counter-insurgency operation can make is alienating the population. If you alienate the population, you're finished.

I think we may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time... The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.

You can't kill your way to success in a counter insurgency effort. You have to protect the people, get the civil military balance right, train the locals, and practice effective strategic communications.

Our military should spare no expense to ensure the safety of our troops, particularly as they confront a hostile insurgency and roadside bombs throughout Iraq.

If we want to build the Iraqis' confidence about our intentions in their country, if we want to stop adding fuel to the fire of insurgency and terrorism, we must clarify our intent.

The Syrian regime is helping the insurgency in Iraq and allowing all kinds of militants to come in and out, and go to Iraq to attack random soldiers and innocent people.

Now that our troops are mired in a dangerous effort to defeat the insurgency and are also trying to help rebuild the country, Americans of all political persuasions simply want the United States to succeed and our troops to be as safe as possible.

I was a part of the planning and attack package intelligence team for the strike against Syria in 1983 - in which we lost a pilot and had another one captured until Jesse Jackson got him out - and numerous other operations against Syria both before the Iraq war and during the insurgency.

There is no clear or meaningful difference between insurgency and civil war, or between national terrorism and civil war for that matter.

I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.

We are tangled in a very significant Islamic insurgency in Iraq.

We cannot kill or capture our way out of an industrial-strength insurgency.

The Pakistani Army, the Frontier Corps, the Frontier Scouts and Police have carried out quite impressive counter-insurgency operations.

By the end of 2008, clearly the Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgency had been relatively stabilized. And in the Al Qaeda's mind, they were defeated.

There was an insurgency under President Hosni Mubarak in the 1990s. Egyptian police and soldiers fought weekly battles with Islamists in the sugarcane fields and thick reeds along the Nile in rural southern villages like Minya, Sohag, Enna and Assiout.

As the insurgency in Iraq started to grow, we realized this is a connected network of individual actors that can move at light speed.

We remember the grind of the insurgency -- the roadside bombs, the sniper fire, the suicide attacks. From the 'triangle of death' to the fight for Ramadi; from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south -- your will proved stronger than the terror of those who tried to break it.

There [in Afghanistan] is also a growing insurgency threat from al-Qaida, the Taliban and other extremist elements, some of which comes from the tribal areas of Pakistan, as well as from the Northwest Frontier province and Baluchistan.

The presence of American troops is fueling the insurgency in Iraq, as acknowledged by General Casey and numerous other experts, and is helping terrorist recruiters build their numbers across the globe.

I think the behavior of the troops has been a huge factor in the rise of the insurgency and in the rise of the anti-American feelings there[in Iraq].

Almost immediately, I remember right when Tikrit even fell, a few days after Baghdad fell, there was talks of insurgency, there was talks of jihad and of resisting the American occupiers, and slowly this turned into an organized movement.

I am encouraged by the news today that United States special operations personnel found, identified and killed the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the operational commander of the al-Qaeda led insurgency in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi was the public face of the insurgency.

What's happened is that an incessant, an insidious insurgency has repeatedly attacked the key infrastructure targets, reducing outputs.

But the key shift in focus will be from counter-insurgency operations to more and more cooperation with Iraqi security forces and to building Iraqi security capacity.

The administration needs to speak honestly with the American people. Exaggerating our progress in defeating the insurgency or in creating an Iraqi army paints a dangerous picture.

There's a radical insurgency, which is a large part of the Republican base, which is willing to do anything, destroy the country, whatever, in order to get rid of this Affordable Care Act. That's the one thing that they're able to hang onto.