Very briefly, as an historian I always look to analogies from other situations. There are a number of cases where a military group effectively is divorced from the land where it started out. A great example from central Africa is the German army under Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his Askaris in the First World War, who were chased off of German East Africa. I think they were actually in what is now the Congo for part of the time, living off the land as a way of sustaining themselves as a fighting force. From the point of view of the local population, though, that was a humanitarian disaster. Is that roughly analogous to the behaviour of some of these groups?
On May 22nd, 2018. See this statement in context.