Α)The Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria
(The Economist) <:hgroup class=”typog-content-header main-content-header”>Two Arab countries fall
apartAn extreme Islamist group that seeks to create a caliphate and spread jihad across the world has made dramatic advances on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border
of unpopular American-led
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have benefited extreme Islamists, none
more so than the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), a group
that outdoes even al-Qaeda in brutality and fanaticism. In the past
year or so, as borders and government control have frayed across the
region, ISIS has made gains across a swathe of territory encompassing
much of eastern and northern Syria and western and northern Iraq. On
June 10th it achieved its biggest prize to date by capturing Mosul,
Iraq’s second city, and
most of the surrounding province of Nineveh. The next day it advanced
south towards Baghdad, the capital, taking several towns on the way.
Ministers in Iraq’s government admitted that a catastrophe was in the
making. A decade after the American invasion, the country looks as
fragile, bloody and pitiful as ever.After four days of fighting, Iraq’s security forces abandoned their posts in Mosul as ISIS militiamen took over army bases, banks and government offices. The jihadists seized huge stores of American-supplied arms, ammunition and vehicles, apparently including six Black Hawk helicopters and 500 billion dinars ($430m) in freshly printed cash
. Some 500,000 people fled in terror to areas beyond ISIS’s sway.The scale
of the attack on Mosul was particularly audacious. But it did not come
out of the blue. In the past six months ISIS has captured and held
Falluja, less than an hour’s drive west of Baghdad; taken over parts of
Ramadi, capital of Anbar province; and has battled for Samarra, a city
north of Baghdad that boasts one of Shia Islam’s holiest shrines.
Virtually every day its fighters set off bombs in Baghdad, keeping people in a state of terror. to fight against the Shia-dominated regime of Nuri al-Maliki since the Americans left at the end of 2011.
. By changing its name from the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) by adding the words “and al-Sham”, translated as “the Levant” or “Greater Syria”, it signified its quest to conquer a wider area than present-day Syria.Run by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi jihadist, ISIS may have up to 6,000 fighters in Iraq and 3,000-5,000 in Syria, including perhaps 3,000 foreigners; nearly a thousand are reported to hail from Chechnya and perhaps 500 or so more from France
, Britain and elsewhere in Europe.It is ruthless, slaughtering Shia and other minorities, including Christians and Alawites, the offshoot to which Syria
’s
president, Bashar Assad, belongs. It sacks churches and Shia shrines,
dispatches suicide-bombers to market-places, and has no regard for
civilian casualties.Its recent advances would have been impossible without ISIS’s control since January of the eastern Syrian town of Raqqa, a testing ground and stronghold from which it has made forays farther afield. It has seized and exploited Syrian oilfields in the area and raised cash by ransoming foreign hostages.
Rather than fight simply as a branch of al-Qaeda (“the base” in Arabic), as it did before 2011, it has aimed to control territory, dispensing its own brand of justice and imposing its own moral code: no smoking, football, music, or unveiled women, for example. And it imposes taxes in the parts of Syria and Iraq it has conquered.
In other words, it is creating a proto-state on the ungoverned territory straddling the borderlands between Syria and Iraq. “This is a new, more dangerous strategy since 2011,” says Hassan Abu Haniyeh, a Jordanian expert on jihadist movements. If ISIS manages to hold onto its turf in Iraq, it will control an area the size of Jordan with roughly the same population (6m or so), stretching 500km from the countryside east of Aleppo in Syria into western Iraq.
It holds three border posts between Syria
and Turkey and several more on Syria’s border with Iraq. Raqqa’s
residents say Moroccan and Tunisian jihadists have brought their wives and children to settle in the city. Foreign preachers have been appointed to mosques. ISIS has also set up an intelligence service.The regimes of Mr Assad in Syria and Mr Maliki in Iraq have played into ISIS’s hands by stoking up sectarian resentment among Sunni Arabs, who are a majority of more than 70% in Syria and a minority of around a fifth in Iraq, where they had been dominant under Saddam Hussein. But Mr Assad has cannily left ISIS alone, rightly guessing it would start fighting against the more mainstream rebels, to the regime’s advantage. And he has highlighted the horrors of ISIS to the West, as the spectre of what may come next were he to fall.
Two ogres versus a bunch of thugs
Mr Maliki has been less brutal but more crass than Mr Assad. By the
end of 2011 American forces had almost eradicated ISI, as it still was,
in Iraq. They did so by capturing or killing its leaders and, more
crucially, by recruiting around 100,000 Sunni Iraqis to join the Sahwa,
or Awakening, a largely tribal force to fight ISI, whose harsh rules in
the areas they controlled had turned most of the people against it.But after the Americans left, Mr Maliki disbanded the Sahwa militias, breaking a promise to integrate many of them into the regular army. He purged Sunnis from the government
and cracked down on initially peaceful Sunni protests in Ramadi and Falluja at the end of last year. Anti-American rebels loyal to Saddam and even Sahwa people may have joined ISIS out of despair, feeling that Mr Maliki would never give them a fair deal.
In 2012 Tariq al-Hashemi, the vice-president who was Iraq’s top Sunni,
fled abroad, and was sentenced to death in absentia. Sunnis feel they
have no political representation, says Mr Haniyeh. “ISIS and al-Qaeda
are taking advantage and appropriating Sunni Islam.”Some countries in the region, loathing Mr Assad’s brutality against civilians and Mr Maliki’s brand of Shia triumphalism, initially indulged ISIS. Turkey let a free flow of foreign fighters cross its borders into Syria until the end of last year. Some Gulf states, such as Kuwait and Qatar, were slow to clamp down on private citizens who have funded ISIS and at first tolerated or even applauded its sectarian ire.
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Smoking will be punished: ISIS burns cigarettes in Raqqa,
ISIS has been responsible for 75% to 95% of all the attacks. It has
organised a number of prison breaks, such as one in 2013 from Abu Ghraib,
whence several hundred jihadists escaped to join the fray; this week
ISIS may have freed some 2,500 hardened fighters from jail in Mosul.Whether in Iraq or Syria, ISIS has sought to terrify people into submission. On June 8th, as a typical warning to others, it crucified three young men in a town near Aleppo for co-operating with rival rebels. It has kidnapped scores of Kurdish students,
journalists
, aid workers and, more recently, some Turkish diplomats.
Even al-Qaeda has deemed ISIS too violent. Ayman Zawahiri, leader of
the core group, has long disagreed with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS’s
leader, warning him that ISIS’s habit of beheading its opponents and
posting such atrocities on video was giving al-Qaeda a bad name.So far ISIS has been effectively challenged only by fellow Sunnis. It is locked in battle with Jabhat al-Nusra, which al-Qaeda recognises as its affiliate in
Syria. The two groups are tussling over Deir ez-Zor, a provincial
capital between Raqqa and Anbar, leaving 600 fighters dead in the past
six weeks. Since the start of the year, mainstream Syrian rebel groups,
who at first welcomed ISIS for its fighting ability, have battled
against it, forcing it out of areas in the north-western province of
Idleb and the city of Aleppo. Kurdish forces in the north-east have done
the same.Some reckon that ISIS’s recent push in Iraq may be intended to bolster its rearguard, enabling it to replenish its coffers and armoury, before striking back at the rebel opposition in Syria. The more moderate rebels are ill-equipped to fight for ever against ISIS; they say that half their forces have already been diverted from the fight against Mr Assad to hold ISIS at bay.
The forces best equipped to face down ISIS may be Kurdish ones: the Peshmerga guerrillas, who have protected Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region for the past two decades, and the People’s Protection Units, better known as the YPG, the armed wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which dominates north-eastern Syria. The Kurds’ regional government
in Iraq has mobilised its forces on the east side of the Tigris river,
which runs through Mosul, and may well block ISIS from heading east and
north into Kurdish territory; on June 12th the Kurds captured all of
Kirkuk city from fleeing Iraqi forces. Yet Mr Maliki may have to call on
the Kurds to help him out against ISIS.
Don’t come back home
Western governments are fretting about the threat from some of their
own citizens who have joined the likes of ISIS and may come home to make
trouble. On May 28th Barack Obama
asked for an additional $5 billion for counter-terrorism programmes.
ISIS people have not hidden their intention to carry out attacks in the
West in the name of jihad. The man accused of killing four men dead in Belgium’s Jewish museum on May 24th was a veteran of Syria’s war. ISIS runs training camps in the desert of eastern Syria. Jordan and Turkey are worried too.But few governments, except perhaps Iran, are keen to arm Mr Maliki’s increasingly nasty and incompetent regime. Last year the United States did agree
to sell Iraq more weapons, including F-16 fighter jets. The threat of
terrorism against the West may prod Western governments into giving more
arms and help to the anti-ISIS Syrian rebels. But helping Mr Maliki
more wholeheartedly is another matter. Mr Obama has refused to hit ISIS
with drones.In the long run the biggest hope for containing ISIS lies in its lack of a broadly popular base. After all, al-Qaeda itself dismally failed to capture Arab minds during the Arab spring. Most Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis do not wish to be ruled by extremists. Mosul and other areas may yet return to the hands of the government. Yet Syrians and Iraqis are both trapped between dictators on the one hand and extremists on the other. An unhappy choice
.
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Most reporting on the offensive the transnational jihadist group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant launched in Iraq has focused on tactical aspects. Few if any have discussed the strategic thinking behind the group’s decision to proceed with such a massive undertaking requiring significant amounts of its resources. The discrepancy in reporting is due to the tendency to view jihadists through the lens of ideology rather than viewing them as rational actors. Like all other geopolitical actors, the militant group’s leadership decided to strike only after assessing threats and opportunities.
In the past two and a half years, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant made significant territorial gains in neighboring Syria. These advances
came despite its having to fight on multiple fronts against the al
Assad regime and its Shiite backers (Iran, Hezbollah and fighters from
across the Muslim world),
Syrian Kurdish separatists and a constellation of rival rebel groups,
many of which subscribe to milder versions of Salafist-jihadist ideology
and enjoy backing from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The group is also fighting various other jihadist groups, such its former brothers in arms from the al Qaeda franchise group Jabhat al-Nusra.While expending most of its efforts in Syria
,
the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant also maintained a steady tempo
of operations in Iraq. It capitalized on the growing disenchantment
among Iraqi Sunnis with the Shiite regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The group’s sudden focus on Iraq came from a desire to pursue an available opportunity to achieve its ultimate goal of re-establishing the caliphate.
What is a Geopolitical Diary? George Friedman Explains.
The U.S. move to effect regime change in Iraq in 2003 and the outbreak of the Arab Spring in Syria
in 2011 have resulted in the meltdown of once powerful Arab
autocracies. The transnational jihadist movement has since sought to
exploit the ensuing anarchy in the region. The rise of the Iranian-led
Shiite camp over the last decade or so has created an additional
opportunity for jihadists to mobilize Sunni fighters from
Muslim-majority countries and among Western expatriates.Despite its audacious offensive, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant remains mindful that it has two still formidable Iranian-backed Shiite regimes blocking its path. To the west, the al Assad regime in Damascus has turned the tide against the rebels, giving rise to a stalemate. To the east, it faces the al-Maliki regime, though political and security conditions in Iraq have sharply deteriorated since the withdrawal
of U.S. forces at the end of 2011. Power struggles among the country’s three principal
groups (Shia, Kurd and Sunni) have weakened Baghdad’s writ, creating
the opening that enabled the recent jihadist offensive. Refocusing on
Iraq offers a way to force Iran and its Shiite allies to reallocate
resources in Syria to defending their position
in Iraq, which contains sites of greater significance to Shiite Islam.
It could even help them break the stalemate in Syria. The shift toward
Iraq enables the militant group to deflect criticism that it has been
fighting with fellow Sunnis and even Salafist-jihadists in Syria.The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant knows that its opportunity in Iraq will not stay open for long given that demographic trends in Iraq favor the Shia. It also recognizes its limits among Iraq’s Sunnis. Most important, it understands the convergence of U.S., Iranian and Turkish interests that is underway; for different reasons, none of these three countries can tolerate its expansion in Iraq.
This means the group knows it is not in a position to seize Baghdad just yet. For now, it must try quickly to consolidate
itself in the Sunni-dominated provinces of Anbar, Ninawa and Salah ad
Din, as well as the mixed provinces of Kirkuk and Diyala. It knows that
the outside countries will not send ground forces into Iraq’s Sunni areas and instead will rely on air power and special operations forces against its fighters.Therefore, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant will limit itself to establishing a presence in western Iraq similar to what it has in eastern Syria, where outsiders will fear to tread and where neither the Shiite-dominated central government
nor the Kurdistan Regional Government
can impose its writ. If the jihadist group can survive, any amount of
space where it can enjoy freedom of activity will suffice for its
purposes of establishing an emirate in the roughly contiguous
cross-border area, affording it strategic depth and a launchpad for
later offensives against Baghdad and Damascus.Stratfor
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