The ISIS Solution

by Jack Murphy

  The more analysis that is done of ISIS’s strategy, the more evident it becomes that there is nothing especially new; it is using tried-and-true guerrilla warfare strategies, pioneered by leftist movements building on the earlier history of guerrilla warfare. The use of Maoist strategy suggests that the leadership has studied extensively in preparation for the current campaign.

  While strategy is the road map to winning the war, tactics are the steps taken to win the battles. Tactically, ISIS is still something of a mixed bag, showing considerable sophistication on an operational level, while on an individual and small-unit level, it doesn’t seem to have improved much since 2003. We’ll examine the operational level first.

  Operationally, since the beginning of the conquest phase, ISIS has been using a combination of guerrilla raids and overt maneuver warfare. Even when confronting its enemies directly, it has attacked positions of weakness and avoided strengths, and when confronted with strength, it has fallen back.

  The move on Mosul in June was deliberately against a weakened opponent, indeed an opponent that was probably already compromised. There is no available firsthand information on what kind of reconnaissance or espionage was employed prior to the move. However, the apparent alliance with the northern Sunni tribal groups offers an explanation. ISIS didn’t actually have to put any of its core fighters into Mosul to determine the lay of the land as far as the Iraqi Army leadership or the atmospherics of the populace. It simply had to talk to the tribal groups that included people in the city. From that, they were able to piece together a sufficient picture of the rot in the Iraqi Army in Mosul and the discontent with Baghdad to risk moving on the city with fewer than two thousand fighters.

  There were a number of voices at the time of Mosul’s fall opining about the flight and/or turning of Iraqi generals in Mosul, up to and including Maliki, saying that there was a conspiracy to hand over the city to ISIS. A group called the Jaysh al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandiya, a Sunni militia that has in the past campaigned to end the “Safavid” occupation of Iraq, started putting up posters and producing videos suggesting that Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of the most notorious of Saddam’s Baathist Party loyalists, who was never captured, had led ISIS forces into Mosul and was going to be the new Ninewa provincial governor. These claims have proved to be nothing but propaganda (al-Douri has not appeared in Mosul to anyone’s knowledge, and the video where he addressed the people of Mosul showed a frail seventy-year-old man struggling to read a prepared statement), but they are illustrative of how ISIS has used tribal alliances. The al-Naqshbandiya has not always been on good terms with ISIS, yet they are now allies. And while al-Douri may not have been directly involved, there are definitely Baathist elements involved in northern Iraq.20 ISIS has therefore used not only maneuver warfare in taking Mosul but also tribal and sectarian proxies as force multipliers.

  ISIS has kept its field forces light. While it has captured plenty of Syrian and Iraqi armored vehicles in recent months (many of the Iraqi vehicles U.S.-supplied), there have been few if any reports of them actually being used in frontline combat, at least in Iraq. The given figures for targets hit once the U.S. air strikes began in August include very little in the way of armored fighting vehicles. While most of the images of captured U.S. and Russian armor were from parades in Raqqa, it appears that most of such vehicles have been pulled back to ISIS havens in Syria to be used to defend against the Syrian regime and the group’s rivals in the rebellion.21

  There is good reason for this. Keeping forces light makes the ISIS forces maneuverable and hard to spot and hit. Keeping to up-armored Humvees and pickup trucks with mounted machine guns, heavy machine guns, or automatic grenade launchers allows them to move with greater speed. Main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles can rarely manage much more than forty-five miles per hour on the road (in fact, the Abrams, of which ISIS captured quite a few, has an engine governor that keeps it from traveling faster than that). Even up-armored Humvees, most of which are likely fairly worn out by now, can manage close to sixty miles per hour.

  Another key to ISIS’s flexibility has been its logistics. The group has captured a great deal of matériel, and fuel is no exception. Keeping to light, fast forces reduces the fuel requirements. An Abrams tank requires five hundred gallons of jet fuel to cover 265 miles. A Toyota HiLux, by contrast, can cover about five hundred miles on one twenty-gallon tank of gasoline. Add in the considerable maintenance requirements of tracked armored vehicles, and the decision to use technicals makes even more sense.

  In addition, whether planned for or not, once the air campaign began, ISIS’s light, fast operational profile enabled the group to scatter and go low profile more easily when the jets flew overhead. The veteran fighters had plenty of experience hiding from American aircraft before 2012 and Syrian aircraft in the years since. In a country with a lot of small and midsized pickups on the roads, it is considerably easier to hide a pickup-centered force than large armored vehicles.

  So the ISIS fighters are light and fast on the battlefield and can exploit weaknesses quickly once identified. In maneuver warfare, the terms are “gaps” and “surfaces.” Gaps are weak points where an enemy’s line of resistance can be penetrated; surfaces are strong points. ISIS consistently avoids surfaces and goes for gaps.

  ISIS initially avoided confronting the Kurdish peshmerga after taking Mosul, preferring to launch attacks on the demoralized Iraqi Army. While they certainly exploited the Sunni-Shi’a split and the unwillingness of Shi’a troops to fight for Sunni cities in the north, the terror campaign exemplified by the mass executions of prisoners in Mosul was also calculated to break the Iraqi soldiers’ will to resist. With their fellow Iraqi Army soldiers having crumbled in the face of ISIS’s advance, and then seeing what happened to those who were taken alive, the effect on morale, and therefore the will to resist, was devastating. The fact that the prisoners who were marched to their deaths did so without a single sign of defiance toward their captors cannot have done anything but further drive home the message that ISIS was invincible. That in and of itself was a powerful weapon.

  When faced with stiffer resistance, however, the ISIS fighters did not show any reluctance to fall back. The Bayji oil refinery, a major strategic asset, became a target within days of the fall of Mosul. Initial reports said that the ISIS fighters had actually seized the refinery. However, when faced by an Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service counterattack, they faded. The importance of the refinery has led to continuous attacks in the weeks and months since, but as long as the Iraqis defend it with any kind of tenacity, the ISIS attackers continue to fall back.

  Once the drive against the Kurds began, primarily as ISIS went for Mosul Dam, their blitzkrieg-style maneuver tactics became that much more obvious. As light and fast as the ISIS forces were, they were facing equally lightly armed peshmerga. The peshmerga, for all its reputation for ferocity, is a lightweight mountain militia, and had been underequipped for some time, due to political disputes with Baghdad (Maliki had refused to pass on at least one major arms and munitions shipment intended for the Kurdistan Regional Government and the peshmerga).

  The peshmerga fighters in the north were also not well situated. The majority of their forces were concentrated near Kirkuk, which the Kurds quickly occupied once the Iraqi Army fled the city in the opening days of the ISIS offensive in June. It should be noted that the two main political parties of Iraqi Kurdistan, the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) and the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party), are run by the Talabani and Barzani families, respectively, and those two families and parties have a long-standing feud with each other. No sooner had the United States put up a no-fly zone over Northern Iraq in the ’90s, getting Saddam off their backs, than the PUK and KDP embarked on a five-year civil war. While the two parties have effectively united to form the Kurdistan Regional Government, the feud remains, and each party runs its own half of the peshmerga, which can damage cohesion—another weakness for ISIS to exploit.

  When ISI
S turned its offensive against the peshmerga, its fighters first advanced on Sinjar, reportedly attacking the city from three directions. They had prepped the battle space for weeks, attacking peshmerga forces with complex ambushes and artillery, as well as destroying the Badush bridge in order to limit peshmerga mobility.22 While the Kurdish authorities denied that the peshmerga had fled Sinjar without fighting on August 3, it is apparent that, given the attacks to degrade their position in the district, the Kurds did indeed break when the ISIS attack finally descended.

  In the following days, ISIS drove the peshmerga from Makhmour and finally took Gwer, fifteen miles from the Kurdistan Regional Government’s capital of Erbil. Reports indicated that, coupled with artillery bombardment, the fast, mobile ISIS forces were finding weak points in the Kurdish positions, driving through and then attacking the peshmerga from the flanks, if not shattering the defending unit with the initial penetration. (Reliable frontline reports have been difficult to obtain; both ISIS and the Kurds have a vested interest in pumping up their accomplishments, or saving face, depending on the situation. The Kurds have, for instance, made a great deal out of the shortages of ammunition when it comes to their forces withdrawing in the face of ISIS attacks. This is certainly an issue, especially considering the efforts by the Maliki government to keep anyone not Shi’a Arab–Persian disarmed, but it is just as likely that the shortage provides a convenient excuse for cutting and running. Without eyes on the actual situation, it is difficult to be sure, but there have been notable examples of the peshmerga overstating their own offensives.)

  ISIS has also consistently employed combined arms, in spite of its light, fast operational profile. Although the inventory is unknown, and changes daily depending on captures or losses, ISIS is known to have mostly truck-based mortars and towed howitzers. It has captured several self-propelled artillery pieces, which it has shown in parades in Raqqa, but, like the tanks, they appear to be kept in safe havens in Syria rather than being employed on the front lines in Iraq.

  ISIS has used these supporting arms in Iraq for both harassing fire and direct support prep fires for attacks, on the offensive as well as guerrilla raids within enemy-held territory. As recently as this writing, harassing attacks on checkpoints of a few mortar rounds have been daily occurrences.23 Most Kurdish positions in villages were shelled before being overrun.

  In Syria, ISIS has used the heavier artillery pieces to facilitate extended sieges of Syrian government positions. The most notable in recent months was the base held by the Syrian Army’s Division 17, just outside Raqqa, which ISIS stormed in late July.24 The Syrian Army appears to have held up far better than the Iraqi Army has, so it makes sense to save the heavier weapons for the Syrian front.

  An example of the use of artillery prep fires for a guerrilla raid is the September 18 attack on the Camp Justice prison in Baghdad. The initial attack, aimed at the prison itself, consisted of a mortar barrage, though aimed not only at the prison. More rounds landed on the Aaima floating bridge to the north, and the Sunni Endowment farther north of that. (The attack failed; the suicide bombers who were intended to breach the prison complex were captured.)

  ISIS has continued to utilize suicide bombers, both of the foot-mobile and suicide VBIED (vehicle-borne improvised explosive device) variety. During the attempted raid on the Camp Justice prison, the courtyard was breached by a suicide VBIED, and two individuals with suicide vests were arrested before they could get to their target. The fact that they were arrested rather than detonating suggests they were willing to be “martyred” to get to the target, but when the mission went bad, they lost the will to commit suicide. The question is, is this now ISIS policy, or did the suicide bombers chicken out? There is no way to know absent the Iraqi Security Forces’ interrogation records, which we do not have.

  The use of suicide bombers and IEDs appears to be continuing previously observed trends going back to AQI—they are being utilized as both terror weapons and breaching tools. Absent their targets, the roadside bombs aimed at Coalition convoys are no longer used; VBIEDs have been directed at political targets, one of the more recent ones being the Badr Organization headquarters in Baghdad on September 18. (The Badr Organization is a Shi’a militia that has taken a lead role in resistance against ISIS.) Others have been set off in high-traffic areas of majority-Shi’a neighborhoods. In fact, the low-level terror bombing campaign in Baghdad continues.

  The primary battlefield use for suicide VBIEDs appears to be breaching defenses. The fall of the Division 17 base near Raqqa was reported to have begun with a suicide VBIED to the gate. A similar tactic was employed in the “Destroying the Walls” attack on Abu Ghraib in 2013, and as many as eight suicide VBIEDs were used in the attack on the Baiji oil refinery on September 24.25 The concept appears to be to use the explosion to breach whatever physical defenses are on site and then to overwhelm the defenders with the force of the explosion, placing follow-on attackers at an advantage. (This is not a new tactic, nor one limited to ISIS. The attack on the Ariana Hotel in Kabul in 2011 was initiated by a suicide VBIED at the gate.) A truck can carry far more explosives than any rocket, and the suicide driver provides terminal guidance. While there have not yet been reports of up-armored suicide VBIEDs in Iraq, ISIS has been utilizing them in Syria. Again, this appears to be a sign that the heavy weapons are being reserved for use against the Syrian Army, signifying a certain contempt for the Iraqi Army and peshmerga alike.

  The first up-armored VBIEDs appeared in late 2013, apparently used by Jabhat al-Nusra. A large truck, usually a tanker or commercial dump truck, is loaded with explosives, and heavy steel sheets are welded to the cab to protect the suicide bomber from small-arms fire as he advances on the target.

  ISIS’s suicide bombers appear to be mostly foreign recruits, such as Moner Muhammad Abu-Salha, a twenty-two-year-old Floridian who detonated himself in an up-armored dump truck in Syria in April.26 The frontline fighters do not appear to be chosen as suicide bombers, suggesting that ISIS has a central core of semiprofessional mujahideen, with the newcomers being the first to be considered expendable. This is, of course, sensible, as the experienced fighters are more valuable than the newcomers coming from elsewhere who have never fought.

  Reports of what the would-be suicide bombers are being promised suggest that, in fact, ISIS is recruiting disposable cannon fodder for just that purpose. Abu-Salha painted a picture of a far better life as a mujahideen, and a hedonistic paradise awaiting those who were killed in jihad, with an emphasis on the beauty of the women waiting there. It appears tailored to appeal to young, impressionable men who are dissatisfied enough with their life to be willing to throw it away. Although many of the legends of the Ismaili cult of Hashishin have been determined to be little more than anti-Ismaili propaganda, there appears to be a decided resemblance between the propaganda stories about the Ismaili assassins, who used public murder as a tool of terror and intimidation, often with the assassin sacrificing his own life to take out his target, and the modern-day suicide bombers. Whether this is a deliberate appropriation of the stories of the indoctrination of new Ismaili fedayeen is unclear, but it is an interesting parallel. If it is, the fact that Sunni Salafists are willing to copy Shi’a Ismailis also demonstrates a pragmatism that might be belied by their propaganda.

  One of the elements of truly successful maneuver in warfare is decentralized command. Pioneered by the German Bundeswehr, largely under Moltke, the technical term is “mission-based tactics” or Auftragstaktik. In mission-based tactics, the overall commander gives his subordinates a general set of orders, akin to, “Here is your target, here are your assets, go get it done.” In the U.S. military, it is referred to as “commander’s intent.” Although the Germans elevated it to an art form in land warfare, its use is much older; Lord Nelson frequently gave his ship captains a desired end state and then let them fight as they saw fit in pursuit of that goal.

  ISIS appears to be using mission-based tactics and orders. From what has been de
termined, the commanders in the field get a general picture of which city or village to target and then decide how to attack the objective. This has had the effect of giving ISIS a very small SIGINT signature; the orders are simple enough that they can be easily passed by courier or a short phone conversation on a disposable cell (ubiquitous in Iraq). Again, ISIS has apparently learned the lessons from the last decade, where an overt signals signature tends to draw guided missile or bombs onto the transmitter. By going low-tech while simultaneously allowing subordinate commanders significant leeway to pursue their objectives, ISIS can continue to pursue a sophisticated and widespread maneuver warfare campaign on at least two fronts, while evading the higher-technology solutions of its enemies in the West.

  So, on an operational level, we have a light, fast, maneuver-based organization that uses decentralized command to coordinate its actions with the fewest possible signals. Whoever are calling the shots (there are a number of theories that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is little more than a figurehead, given his lack of known military experience and the sophistication of the group’s offensive), they have studied warfare and know what they doing on strategic and operational levels, making up for their weaknesses by playing up their strengths and capitalizing on terror to degrade their enemies’ will to fight.

  On a small-unit level, although there are no reliable firsthand after-action reviews, there is a lot of video footage coming out of Iraq and Syria. By watching the ISIS troops in action, we can determine several things. For example, an excerpt from the Flames of War propaganda video shows the storming of a Syrian radar installation. While the ISIS fighters stay under cover while their rocket-propelled grenade gunners engage the Syrian tanks outside the installation, once the tanks are down, the fighters are seen running upright, in no particular formation, across the open field between their initial position and the wall around the installation. Several are firing as they go (it can be assumed that they are attempting to suppress the enemy, but there is no real use of sights or even stocks). Once at the wall, they are bunched up and shooting over the wall or through holes knocked in it, again often without appearing to aim. The brief attack on the Division 17 base outside Raqqa documented in the VICE News report on ISIS shows much the same thing: The ISIS fighters are shooting at the Syrian soldiers without using the sights.