Dear Mr. President

Terrorism is one of the greatest global threats faced today. Terrorism has existed throughout history, but recently this epidemic has heavily spread, the number of terrorist attacks has drastically increased, and in 2014 alone 32,658 people were killed by terrorist groups, an 80% increase from 2013. These attacks are becoming more and more deadly as time passes, and as recently as December 10, 2016, a stadium bombing in the Turkish capital, Ankara claimed the lives of 38 and injured as many as 155. This barbaric attack, along with many others are proof that we as a nation, or even as a planet, cannot tolerate these groups and their barbaric attacks. We, along with the rest of the international community must send them a clear message that we will not stand idly by as these barbaric acts take place and as innocents are massacred. However, these groups use fear in an attempt to prevent any nation from interfering with their barbaric and horrible plots. In many cases this works, and nations reuse to fight the terrorist plague out of fear of a major attack happening in their home country. We must prevent this by standing strongly together against the terrorist threat.

These terrorist groups are only getting more violent and more barbaric as time goes on. One of the many examples of this is a scene becoming more and more common, mass graves being dug in Iraq, packed to the brim with innocents slaughtered by ISIS, and these graves are becoming a more and more common sight. However these atrocities do not only occur in the middle east, one of the worst terrorist attacks in all of history happened right here in The U.S, the 9/11 attacks claimed the lives of 2,277 innocent civilians, and is a day that will forever go down in infamy. This proves this issue is worldwide, and must be treated by nations worldwide.

In the wise words of Franklin Roosevelt, “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck to crush him.” We must do exactly this, terrorist groups are not shrinking, they are growing, and we must not wait until the next major attack to strike back, we must crush them before it is too late. The two major powers of terrorist groups are the people, even though it may not seem like it, and their economy. We must sway the people from their side and take down their economy if we want to ever have any hope of ridding the world of terrorist groups once and for all. Take for example ISIS, after taking territories they continue to supply water and power, and are surprisingly competent in that matter, and are even gaining over 3 million dollars a day. Why, you may ask, because they simply know that much of their power lies within their people, and without them they would be nothing. Even if we were able to eradicate the plague that is ISIS, if we do not sway the people from their side, another group would quickly form. For example, after we had gotten rid of a group called al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, ISIS formed to fill the void since we had not swayed the people from their side. If we wanted to take down ISIS, we have two options, one being to enter a long and deadly ground war amassing at the very least tens of thousands of casualties on both sides, including innocent women and children, along with the risk of not even being able to completely eradicate ISIS, or we, along with the rest of the countries of the world, must take them down economically by freezing bank accounts, imposing sanctions on countries helping them, seizing or stopping their oil network, and re-taking vital economic cities such as Mosul. This would effectively cut off the majority of ISIS’ funding leaving them unable to supply their soldiers causing them to lose territories and prevent the gaining of new territories, and rendering their efforts to power and supply their cities useless, causing citizens to sway back to our side and the sides of their governments and lose their loyalty to terrorist groups such as ISIS, making them less likely to form a new group after the what will be imminent fall of ISIS.

So, Mr. President, I ask you, will you go down in history as the hero who ended terrorism, or a coward who sat idly by as innocents, including his own citizens died? Will the world finally be rid of this terrorist plague? Or will you allow the children of the next generations to cower in fear as their families are being torn apart by the barbaric actions of the epidemic of terrorism? The future of not only our great nation, but of the entire Earth is in your hands, do with it what you will, but in the end, please take care of not only our country, but our world, and do it wisely.