The Rise of Islamic State (10 page)

Furthermore, the US is unlikely to want to appear as the preserver of Shia dominance over the Sunni minority, especially when exercised by a government in Baghdad that is as sectarian, corrupt, and dysfunctional as Saddam’s ever was. There may be less state violence than before 2003, but only because the state is weaker. The Maliki government’s methods are equally brutal: Iraqi prisons are full of people who have made false confessions under torture or the threat of it. Sunni villages near Fallujah are full of families with sons on death row. An Iraqi intellectual who had planned to open a museum
in Abu Ghraib prison so that Iraqis would never forget the barbarities of Saddam’s regime found that there was no space available because the cells were full of new inmates. Iraq is still an extraordinarily dangerous place. “I never imagined that ten years after the fall of Saddam you would still be able to get a man killed in Baghdad by paying $100,” an Iraqi who’d been involved in the abortive museum project told me.

As Iraq disintegrates into separate Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish regions, the process is likely to be painful and violent. Sectarian confrontations will be unavoidable where there are mixed populations, such as in and around Baghdad with its seven million people. It seems unlikely that the country could be partitioned without extensive bloodshed and several million refugees. A possible outcome is an Iraqi version of the wrenching violence that accompanied the partition of India in 1947.

The situation is equally bleak in Syria. Too many conflicts and too many players have become involved for any peace terms to be acceptable to all. Comparison is frequently made with the Lebanese civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, with the comforting moral drawn that, bloody though that conflict was, all sides eventually became exhausted and put away their guns. But the war did not quite end like that: it was Saddam Hussein’s
invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and Syria’s decision to join the US-led coalition to evict him that led Washington to tolerate Syria extinguishing the last resistance to its rule in Lebanon. It is not a very comforting parallel.

There is no doubt that the Syrian people, both inside and outside the country, are utterly exhausted and demoralized by the civil war and would do almost anything to end it. But they are no longer in a position to determine their own fate. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arming and training a new “moderate military opposition” that will supposedly fight Assad and ISIS and other al-Qaeda–type groups. But it is not clear that the “moderate” military opposition has any substance except as a tightly controlled cat’s paw of foreign powers.

Only time will tell if President Assad is strong enough to break the current stalemate in Syria, though this seems unlikely. The combat forces of the Syrian army have hitherto been able to fight on only one front at a time, while it has become increasingly obvious that al-Qaeda–type movements, notably ISIS, JAN, and Ahrar al-Sham, can operate freely across Syria’s borders with Iraq and Turkey. They have a vast hinterland in which to maneuver.

So long as the civil war continues, fanatical groups such as ISIS, with legions of fighters who are prepared to
sacrifice their lives, will continue to hold the upper hand over moderates who might be more open to negotiations. In this situation, the importance of Syrian public opinion is diminishing steadily. However, it still counts for something. One of the few positive events to occur in Syria in the early summer of 2014 was the evacuation of the Old City of Homs by 1,200 fighters, who were allowed to bring their personal weapons to rebel-held territory, while, at the same time, two pro-regime Shia towns, Zahraa and Nubl, besieged for two years by the opposition, were able to receive humanitarian convoys. In addition, seventy hostages taken in Aleppo and Latakia were released. Encouragement can be drawn from the fact that different rebel groups were sufficiently coherent to negotiate and implement an agreement, something that had been deemed impossible. This kind of local peace negotiation cannot stop the overall conflict, but it can save lives along the way.

None of the religious parties that took power, whether in Iraq in 2005 or Egypt in 2012, has been able to consolidate its authority. Rebels everywhere look for support from the foreign enemies of the state they are trying to overthrow. The Syrian opposition can only reflect the policies and divisions of its sponsors. Resistance to the
state was too rapidly militarized for opposition movements to develop an experienced national leadership and a political program. The discrediting of nationalism and communism, combined with the need to say what the US wanted to hear, meant that they were at the mercy of events, lacking any vision of a nonauthoritarian nation-state capable of competing with the religious fanaticism of the Sunni militants of ISIS and similar movements financed by the oil states of the Gulf. Now the results of this have spread across the border to Iraq. The Middle East is entering a long period of ferment in which counterrevolution may prove as difficult to consolidate as revolution itself.

The long siege of the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani by ISIS, ongoing at the time of writing, was the first serious check to the jihadis’ advance. Over four months, they had won a succession of victories. In swift campaigns over the summer ISIS defeated the Iraqi army, the Syrian army, the Syrian rebels, and the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga; it established a state stretching from Baghdad to Aleppo and from Syria’s border with Turkey to the western deserts of Iraq.

Ethnic and religious groups of which the world had never heard or knew little, such as the Yazidis of Sinjar and the Chaldean Christians of Mosul, had become
victims of ISIS’s cruelty and sectarian bigotry. In September, it was the turn of the two-and-a-half million Syrian Kurds, who had gained de facto autonomy in three cantons in northern Syria just south of the Turkish border. One of these cantons, centered on the town of Kobani, became the target of a determined assault. By October 6, ISIS fighters had fought their way into the center of the town and its imminent fall was predicted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo
ğ
an, while US Secretary of State John Kerry spoke of “the tragedy” of Kobani, but nervously played down the significance of its capture. When a well-known Kurdish fighter, Arin Mirkan, blew herself up while surrounded by advancing ISIS fighters it looked like a sign of despair and impending defeat.

It also looked as if US plans to fight the Islamic State were in ruins as its fighters came close to capturing Kobani and had, in addition, inflicted a further heavy defeat on the Iraqi army west of Baghdad. The US-led air attacks launched against ISIS on August 8 in Iraq and September 23 in Syria were not as effective as expected and President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” the militants had not shown the first sign of success. In both Syria and Iraq, ISIS was still expanding its control rather than contracting.

ISIS reinforcements had been rushing toward Kobani in the effort to achieve a decisive victory over the town’s remaining defenders. The jihadis were willing to take heavy casualties in street fighting and from air attacks in order to add to the string of victories they had won since they captured Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, on June 10. Part of the strength of the fundamentalist movement is a sense that there is something inevitable and divinely inspired about its victories, whether it is against superior numbers in Mosul or US airpower at Kobani.

In the face of a likely ISIS victory at Kobani, senior US officials tried to explain away their nation’s failure to save the town’s Syrian Kurds, probably the jihadis’ toughest opponents in Syria. “Our focus in Syria is in degrading the capacity of [the Islamic State] at its core to project power, to command itself, to sustain itself, to resource itself,” said US deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken, in a typical piece of waffle designed to mask defeat. “The tragic reality is that in the course of doing that there are going to be places like Kobani where we may or may not be able to fight effectively.”

It never happened: Washington could not allow ISIS another victory after Obama’s rhetoric about degrading and destroying the movement. On October 19, US C-130
aircraft dropped twenty-one tons of arms and equipment to the rebels in Kobani to enable them to hold out. At the same time, the Turks appeared to reverse their previous hostility toward the Syrian Kurdish defenders at Kobani by announcing that they would allow a detachment of peshmerga to reinforce the beleaguered town.

At the time of writing, Kobani still has not fallen, though ISIS forces are entrenched in large parts of the town. Unfortunately for the US, it isn’t the only place where air strikes are failing to stop the militants. In an offensive in Iraq launched on October 2 but little reported in the outside world, ISIS captured almost all the cities and towns it did not already hold in Anbar province, a vast area in western Iraq that makes up a quarter of the country. It had seized the city of Hit and much of the provincial capital Ramadi, which it had long fought for. Other cities, towns and bases on or close to the Euphrates River west of Baghdad fell in a few days, often after little resistance from the Iraqi Army, which proved as dysfunctional as ever, even with US air support. Soon only the city of Haditha and the Al-Asad military base near Hit were still in Iraqi government hands. In a study entitled “Iraq’s Security Forces Collapse as the Islamic State Takes Control of Most of Anbar Province,” Joel Wing concluded that “this was a huge victory for IS as
it gives the insurgents virtual control over Anbar and poses a serious threat to western Baghdad.”

The battle for Anbar, which was at the heart of the Sunni rebellion against the American occupation after 2003, has ended with a decisive victory for ISIS. It took large parts of Anbar in January and government counterattacks failed dismally with some 5,000 casualties in the first six months of the year. About half the province’s 1.5 million population has fled and become refugees. The next target may be the Sunni enclaves of western Baghdad, starting with Abu Ghraib on the outskirts but leading right to the center of the capital.

The Iraqi government and its foreign allies are drawing comfort from the fact there have been some advances against ISIS in the center and the north of the country. But north and northeast of Baghdad the successes have not been won by the Iraqi army but by highly sectarian Shia militias that do not distinguish between ISIS and the rest of the Sunni population. They speak openly of getting rid of the Sunni in mixed provinces like Diyala. The result is that Sunnis in Iraq have no alternative but to stick with ISIS or flee, if they want to survive. The same is true northwest of Mosul on the border with Syria where Iraqi Kurdish forces aided by US air attacks have retaken the important border crossing of Rabia, but only
one Sunni Arab remained in the town. Ethnic and sectarian cleansing has become the norm in the war in both Iraq and Syria.

The siege of Kobani has exposed the weakness of the US-led alliance opposing ISIS. At the start of the bombing in Syria, President Obama boasted of putting together a coalition of regional Sunni powers such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, but these countries all have different agendas from that of the US, and destroying ISIS is not their first priority. The Sunni Arab monarchies may not like ISIS, which threatens the political status quo, but, as one Iraqi observer put it, “They like the fact that ISIS creates more problems for the Shia than it does for them.”

Of the countries supposedly uniting on the American side, by far the most important is Turkey. It shares a 510-mile border with Syria across which Syrian rebels of all sorts, including ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, have passed with ease. This year the Turks have tightened up on border security, but since its successes in the summer ISIS no longer needs sanctuary, supplies, or volunteers from outside to the degree it once did. In the course of the siege of Kobani it became clear that Turkey considered the Syrian Kurdish political and military organizations
the PYD (Democratic Union Party) and YPG (People’s Protection Units) as posing a greater threat than the Islamic fundamentalists.

Moreover, the PYD is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been fighting for Kurdish self-rule in Turkey since 1984. Ever since Syrian government forces withdrew from the Syrian Kurdish cantons on the border with Turkey in July 2012, Ankara has feared the impact of self-governing Syrian Kurds on its own fifteen-million-strong Kurdish population. President Erdo
ğ
an would clearly prefer ISIS to control Kobani rather than the PYD. When five PYD members, who had been fighting in Kobani, were picked up by the Turkish army as they crossed the border in October, they were denounced by as “separatist terrorists.”

Turkey is demanding a high price from the US for its cooperation, such as a Turkish-controlled buffer zone inside Syria, where Syrian refugees are to live and anti-Assad rebels are to be trained. Erdo
ğ
an would like a no-fly zone, which would be another move against the government in Damascus since ISIS has no air force. If implemented, the plan would mean Turkey, backed by the US, would enter the Syrian civil war on the side of the rebels, though the anti-Assad forces are dominated
by ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate. The latter led an attack on the Syrian government–held provincial capital of Idlib on October 27 that almost succeeded and in which seventy government officers were summarily executed in their headquarters.

It is worth keeping in mind when looking at Turkey’s plans that its actions in Syria since 2011 have been a self-defeating blend of imperial hubris and almost comic ineptitude. At the start of the uprising, it could have held the balance between the government and its opponents. Instead, it supported the militarization of the crisis, backed the jihadis, and assumed that Assad would soon be defeated. This did not happen, and what had been a popular uprising became dominated by sectarian warlords who flourished in conditions created by Turkey. Erdo
ğ
an at first seemed to assume that he could disregard the rage of the Turkish Kurds at what they see as his complicity with ISIS against the Syrian Kurds.

The peace process in Turkey that maintained a ceasefire with the PKK since 2013 is close to collapse. Why doesn’t Ankara worry more about this? It may believe that the PKK is too heavily involved in fighting in Syria to resume a war on another front. On the other hand, if Turkey does join the civil war in Syria against Assad, a crucial ally of Iran, then Iranian leaders have said that
“Turkey will pay a price.” This probably means that Iran will covertly support an armed Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. One Iraqi politician commented: “The Iranians have a PhD in this type of warfare.” Saddam Hussein made a somewhat similar mistake to Erdo
ğ
an’s when he invaded Iran in 1980, thus leading Iran to reignite the Kurdish rebellion that Baghdad had crushed through an agreement with the shah in 1975. Turkish military intervention in Syria would not end the war there, but it might well spread the fighting to Turkey.

In attacking Kobani, the ISIS leadership wanted to prove that it could go on defeating its enemies, despite the US airstrikes. ISIS fighters defiantly chanted, “The Islamic State remains, the Islamic State expands,” as they poured into Kobani to replace heavy losses. In the past, ISIS had been tactically agile in breaking off battles it did not think it was going to win, withdrawing from half of the territory it held in Syria in the face of an anti-ISIS rebel offensive in the first half of 2014. But the five-week battle for Kobani probably went on too long and was too well publicized for its militants to withdraw without loss of prestige. The appeal of the Islamic State to Sunni Muslims in Syria, Iraq, and across the world comes in part from a sense that its victories are God-given and inevitable, so any failure damages its claim to divine support.

The final ISIS victory at Kobani that seemed inevitable in early October had not happened at the end of the month, though the militants claimed they were simply mopping up the remaining pockets of resistance. The group was clearly suffering heavy losses in street fighting and from US air strikes. The delivery of arms and equipment to the Syrian branch of the PKK boosted the Kurds’ military strength and morale. The White House became more impatient with Turkey’s ill-concealed preference for ISIS over the Kurds.

Previously, ISIS commanders had been skillful in dispersing their men and hiding their equipment. By October 23, the air campaign of the US-led coalition had sent out 6,600 missions, but of these only 632, or just 10 percent of the total, resulted in air strikes against targets on the ground. But, in seeking to storm Kobani, ISIS military leaders had to concentrate their forces in identifiable positions and became vulnerable to attack. In one forty-eight-hour period there were forty US air strikes, some only fifty yards from the Kurdish front line.

Air strikes might block ISIS from overrunning Kobani, as they could feasibly do in Erbil or even Baghdad, but even this result was in doubt. There are limits to what an air campaign can achieve. The Islamic State was still expanding in October despite American
military intervention. The US was still balking at giving military assistance to those who were fighting ISIS, such as the Syrian army, when it was supposedly still trying to overthrow Assad but, if the US had been serious about combating the extremist jihadis, then it would have realized it had little alternative. ISIS has many enemies, so numerous indeed that they should be able to overwhelm it in the long term, but their disunity and differing agendas mean that the Islamic State is fast becoming an established geographic and political fact on the map.

October 2014