Sunday, 4 January 2015
WRONG AGAIN IN THE FIGHT AGAINST TERROR
IS will remain at the centre of the escalating crisis in the Middle East this year as it was in 2014. The territories it conquered in a series of lightning campaigns last summer remain almost entirely under its control, even though it has lost some towns to the Kurds and Shia militias in recent weeks. United States air strikes in Iraq from 8 August and Syria from 23 September may have slowed up IS advances and inflicted heavy casualties on its forces in the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani. But IS has its own state machinery and is conscripting tens of thousands of fighters to replace casualties, enabling it to fight on multiple fronts from Jalawla on Iraq's border with Iran to the outskirts of Aleppo in Syria. In western Syria, IS is a growing power as the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad loses its advantage of fighting a fragmented opposition, that is now uniting under the leadership of IS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qa’ida.
Yet it is only a year ago that President Obama dismissed the importance of IS, comparing it to a junior university basketball team. Speaking of IS last January, he said that "the analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think it is accurate, is if a JV [junior varsity] team puts on Lakers uniforms it doesn't make them Kobe Bryant [famed player for the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team]." A year later Obama's flip tone and disastrously inaccurate judgement jumps out at one from the page, but at the time it must have been the majority view of his national security staff.
Underrating the strength of IS was the third of three great mistakes made by the US and its Western allies in Syria since 2011, errors that fostered the explosive growth of IS. Between 2011 and 2013 they were convinced that Assad would fall in much the same way as Muammar Gaddafi had in Libya. Despite repeated warnings from the Iraqi government, Washington never took on board that the continuing war in Syria would upset the balance of forces in Iraq and lead to a resumption of the civil war there. Instead they blamed everything that was going wrong in Iraq on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has a great deal to answer for but was not the root cause of Iraq's return to war. The Sunni monarchies of the Gulf were probably not so naïve and could see that aiding jihadi rebels in Syria would spill over and weaken the Shia government in Iraq.
How far has the political and military situation changed today? IS has many more enemies, but they remain divided. American political and military strategies point in different directions. US air strikes are only really decisive when they take place in close cooperation with troops on the ground. This happened at Kobani from mid-October when the White House decided at the last minute that it could not allow IS to humiliate it by winning another victory. Suddenly the Syrian Kurdish fighters battling IS shifted from being "terrorists" held at arm's length to being endangered allies. As in Afghanistan in 2001 and in northern Iraq in 2003, experienced personnel in the front line capable of directing the attacks of aircraft overhead are essential if those strikes are to be effective.
When the bombing of IS in Syria started, the government in Damasalways felt that this was to its advantage. But while the US, Arab monarchies, Syrian rebels and Turkey may have overplayed their hands in Syria between 2011 and 2013, last year it was the Syrian government that did the same thing by seeking a solely military solution to the war. It has never seriously tried to broaden its political base at home by credible offers to share power, relying instead on its supporters to go on fighting because they believe that anything is better than a jihadi victory. But these supporters are becoming worn out by the struggle because they see no end in sight. The government has been short of combat troops, a weakness becoming more apparent as it calls up more reservists and diverts conscripts from entering the National Defence Force militia into the regular army. Government forces have made gains around Aleppo and Damascus, but they are losing ground south of the capital and in Idlib province. There have always been political advantages for Assad at home and abroad in having the Syrian rebels dominated by "terrorists" of whom the West is frightened. But the dominance of IS and Jabhat al-Nusra means that the Syrian army is losing its advantage of being a single force facing a disunited foe with 1,200 different factions. A sign of this underlying weakness is the failure of government troops to launch an expected offensive to retake rebel held parts of Aleppo.
IS won great victories in Iraq in the course of the year by taking advantage of the alienation of the Iraqi Sunni Arab community. This tied the Sunnis' fortunes to IS and, while they may regret the bargain, they probably have no alternative but to stick with it. The war has become a sectarian bloodbath.
Where Iraqi army, Shia militia or Kurdish Peshmerga have driven IS fighters out of Sunni villages and towns from which civilians have not already fled, any remaining Sunni have been expelled, killed or detained. Could IS launch another surprise attack as in June? This would be difficult outside Sunni-majority areas, though it could provoke an uprising in the Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, probably with disastrous results for the remaining Sunni in the capital. They were forced out of mixed areas in 2006 and 2007 and mostly confined to what a US diplomatic cable at the time called "islands of fear" in west Baghdad. IS could create mayhem in the capital, but the strength of the Shia militias is such that it would probably be at the price of the elimination of remaining Sunni enclaves.
Syria's two main foreign backers, Russia and Iran, are both suffering from the collapse in the oil price. This may make them more open to a power-sharing compromise in Syria, but it is by no means clear that they are being offered a deal by the West and its Arab allies. This may be a mistake since at the end of the day the great confrontation between Sunni and Shia across the Muslim world is not going to be decided by Iranian or Russian budgetary problems. Iraqi Shia militia units that withdrew from Syria to fight IS in Iraq can always be sent back and reinforced. The Iranians really do feel this is a war they cannot lose whatever the impact of economic sanctions imposed by the US. The balance of power between government and IS looks fairly even in Iraq at the moment, but this is not true in Syria where Sunni Arabs are 60 per cent of the population as opposed to 20 per cent in Iraq. Above all, IS is strengthened in Syria by the fact that the West, Turkey and the Sunni Arab states are seeking the fall of Assad, IS's main opponent, as well as the overthrow of IS itself. The mutual hatreds of its enemies remain IS's strongest card.
Friday, 26 June 2015
ISIS: ONE YEAR ON
The "Islamic State" is stronger than it was when it was first proclaimed on 29 June last year, shortly after Isis fighters captured much of northern and western Iraq. Its ability to go on winning victories was confirmed on 17 May this year in Iraq, when it seized Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and again four days later in Syria, when it took Palmyra, one of the most famous cities of antiquity and at the centre of modern transport routes.
The twin victories show how Isis has grown in strength: it can now simultaneously attack on multiple fronts, hundreds of miles apart, a capacity it did not have a year ago. In swift succession, its forces defeated the Iraqi and Syrian armies and, equally telling, neither army was able to respond with an effective counter-attack.
Supposedly these successes, achieved by Isis during its summer offensive in 2014, should no longer be feasible in the face of air strikes by the US-led coalition. These began last August in Iraq and were extended to Syria in October, with US officials recently claiming that 4,000 air strikes had killed 10,000 Isis fighters. Certainly, the air campaign has inflicted heavy losses, but it has made up for these casualties by conscripting recruits within the caliphate.
What makes the loss of Ramadi and Palmyra so significant is that they did not fall to surprise attacks, the means by which a few thousand Isis fighters unexpectedly captured Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, in 2014.
That city had a garrison estimated to number about 20,000 men, though nobody knows the exact figure because the Iraqi armed forces were full of "virtual" soldiers, who did not phy
sically exist but whose pay was pocketed by officials. Baghdad later admitted to 50,000 of these. There were, in addition, many soldiers who did exist, but kicked back at least half their salary on the condition that they perform no military duties.
Yet the outcome of the fighting at Ramadi, a Sunni Arab city which once had a population of 600,000, should have been different than at Mosul. The Isis assault in mid-May was the wholly predictable culmination of attacks that had been continuous in the eight months since October 2014. What was unexpected was a retreat that was close to flight by government forces and, in the longer term, the same old fatal disparity between the nominal size of the Iraqi armed forces and their real combat strength.
A crucial feature of the political and military landscape in Iraq is that the Iraqi army never recovered from its defeats of 2014. To meet Isis attacks on many fronts it had fewer than five brigades, or between 10,000 and 12,000 soldiers, capable of fighting while "the rest of the army are only good for manning checkpoints" - in the words of a senior Iraqi security official. Even so, many of these elite units were in Ramadi, though their men complained of exhaustion and of suffering serious casualties without receiving replacements.
In the event, even the presence of experienced troops was not enough. Just why the forces were defeated is partly explained in an interview with Colonel Hamid Shandoukh, who was the police commander in the southern sector of Ramadi during the final battle. The colonel says: "In three days of fighting, 76 of our men were killed and 180 wounded." Isis commanders used a lethal cocktail of well-tried tactics, sending fanatical volunteers driving vehicles packed with explosives to blow themselves up. Suicide bombing on a mass scale was followed by assaults by well trained infantry. Colonel Shandoukh, himself a Sunni Arab, says the root of the problem is that neither the Iraqi security forces nor pro-government tribal forces received reinforcements or adequate equipment. He says that the central failure is sectarian and happened "because of fear that, as the people of Anbar are Sunni, mobilising them will threaten the government later". He complains that sophisticated weapons are reserved for Shia militias and counter-terrorism units, while the predominantly Sunni Arab police in Anbar received only seven Humvees, far fewer than the number captured by Isis in Mosul.
I am a little wary of Colonel Shandoukh's explanation that Isis's victory was thanks to superior weapons denied to his own troops by the Shiadominated Baghdad government. Lack of arms is an excuse invariably used by Iraqi and Kurdish leaders to explain reverses inflicted on them. But this claim is frequently contradicted by videos shot by Isis after it has captured positions, showing heaps of abandoned weaponry.
At Mosul last year and again at Ramadi almost a year later, there was the same breakdown in morale among government commanders leading to a panicky and unnecessary withdrawal. In the sour words of General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff "the Iraqi security forces weren't "driven from" Ramadi, they "drove out of Ramadi".
Colonel Shandoukh regards distrust between Sunni and Shia as the main cause of the rout. Others blame the corruption and overall dysfunctional nature of the Iraqi state in a country in which people's loyalty is to their sectarian or ethnic community. Iraqi nationalism is at a discount.
A more precise reason for the military disintegration may be that the Iraqi army, and this also applies to the Kurdish Peshmerga, have become over-dependent on US air strikes. In Iraqi Kurdistan, Peshmerga respond to Isis attacks by giving their location to the US-Kurdish Joint Operations headquarters in Erbil which calls in air strikes. Significantly, it was an impending sandstorm that would blind US aircraft and drones and prevent their use that was apparently the reason why the order was given for Iraqi forces to abandon Ramadi.
General Dempsey's ill-concealed anger at the debacle at Ramadi may stem from his understanding that the disaster involves more than just the loss of a single city, but discredits the whole American strategy towards IS. The aim was to use US air power in combination with local ground forces to weaken and eliminate Isis. It was a policy that Washington had persuaded itself was working effectively right up to the moment it fell apart on 17 May.
Proof of this is a spectacularly ill-timed briefing given on 15 May by Brigadier General Thomas D Weidley, the chief of staff for Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, as the US-led air campaign to defeat IS is known. "We firmly believe [Isis] is on the defensive, attempting to hold previous gains, while conducting small-scale, localised harassing attacks [and] occasionally complex or high-profile attacks to feed their information and propaganda apparatus," he said.
Keep in mind that on the very day the General was making his upbeat remarks, Isis was over-running the last government strongholds in Ramadi. The US generals were not alone in their over-optimism. The capture of Tikrit, the home city of Saddam Hussein, by the Iraqi army and Shia militias led to exaggerated assumptions that IS was on the retreat. On 1 April the Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, walked down the main street of Tikrit, basking in the plaudits of his triumphant troops.
The loss of Ramadi has exposed Western policy for defeating Isis in Iraq as a failure and no new policy has been devised to take its place. If the same thing has not happened in Syria, it is simply because the West never had a policy there to begin with or, put more charitably, in so far as there was a policy, it was so crippled by contradictions as to rob it of any coherence or chance of success. The West would like to weaken President Bashar al-Assad, but is frightened that, if he goes, his regime will collapse with him and thereby create a vacuum.
Western-backed moderates play only a marginal role among opposition fighters. Robert Ford, the former US ambassador to Syria, and a long-time supporter of the rebel moderates, changed his stance earlier this year announcing that the reality in Syria is that "the people we have backed have not been strong enough to hold their ground against the Nusra Front".
After capturing Palmyra, IS is now threatening Deir Ezzor, a Sunni Arab tribal city, one of the few strongholds still held by the government in eastern Syria. Isis is getting closer to Aleppo, once Syria's largest city, and probably hopes to take it at some point in the future. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, IS "has seized more than 50 per cent of Syria and is now present in 10 of its 14 provinces". It adds that Isis now holds the majority of Syria's oil and gas fields.
This calculation gives a slightly exaggerated idea of IS control in Syria since its dominance is mostly in the scantily-populated regions of the east. It is under pressure from the well-organised Syrian Kurds, fighting against whom it suffered its biggest defeat when it failed to take the city of Kobani despite a four-and-a-half-month siege. On 16 June, Isis lost the important border crossing into Turkey at Tal Abyad after an attack by the Kurds backed by US air power. Earlier this week they were reportedly driven out of the town of Ayn Isa, just 30 miles north of Raqqa.
Once again, this led to over-optimistic talk of Isis weakening, though it did not try very hard to hold either town as they were encircled by Kurdish troops. As in Iraq, Kurdish willingness and ability to advance into Sunni Arab majority areas is limited, so the Kurds will not inflict a decisive defeat on IS. Yesterday there were reports of Isis advancing in other areas. Isis has more long-term opportunities in Syria than Iraq because some 60 per cent of Syrians are Sunni Arabs, compared to only 20 per cent in Iraq. It has yet to dominate the Sunni opposition in Syria to the extent it does in Iraq, but this may come. As sectarian warfare escalates, Isis's combination of fanatical Sunni ideology and military expertise will be difficult to overcome.
Monday, 29 June 2015
WHO IS STRONG ENOUGH TO FIGHT ISIS?
There are seven wars raging in Muslim countries between the borders of Pakistan in the east and Nigeria in the west. In all seven - Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and north-east Nigeria - local versions of Isis are either already powerful or are gaining in influence. Key to its explosive expansion in Iraq and Syria since 2011 is
its capability as a fighting machine, which stems from a combination of religious fanaticism, military expertise and extreme violence. In addition, its successes have been possible because it is opposed by feeble, corrupt or non-existent governments and armies.
The reach of Isis was hideously demonstrated last week by near simultaneous attacks in Tunisia, France, Kuwait and Kobani in Syria. The first three atrocities received blanket media coverage, but the fourth, and by far the biggest massacre, was at Kobani, where at least 220 Kurdish civilians were massacred last Thursday by Isis fighters. Sadly, it was an event that has received only limited attention in the outside world, seen as yet one more tragic but inevitable episode in the war in Syria and Iraq.
Such desensitivity to the slaughter in that conflict is not only wrong, but shows political blindness. What makes the killings in Lyon, Sousse and the Imam al-Sadiq mosque in Kuwait so different from the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks is that these crimes are promoted by a government, in the shape of the self-declared caliphate, which has a more powerful army and rules more people than most members of the UN. The US and Western European governments are eager for their people to avoid focusing on this dangerous development because they do not want to highlight their own culpability in failing to weaken Isis.
Its strengths - as well as its opponents' weaknesses - help to explain its rapid rise and that of other al-Qa’ida-type movements in the Middle East and North Africa. But there is a further toxic ingredient: the exploitation of religious hatreds, most crucially those between Sunni and Shia Muslims. From the moment in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi created the forerunner to al-Qa’ida in Iraq and Isis, its prime target was Shia Iraqis. Suicide bombers slaughtered Shia civilians as they prayed or waited to catch a bus. Much the same is now happening in Muslim countries across the world. An example of this is Yemen, where one-third of the 25 million population belong to the Shia Zaidi sect and the rest are Sunni, but where there has been little sectarian strife in the past.
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