|
|
Follow the Middle East Forum
|
|
|
The
Kurds Can Defeat ISIS if We Provide Incentives
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the first of
your friends to like this.
Originally published under the title "'Remaining and
expanding'."
|
Victorious
Kurdish peshmerga forces in Sinjar, Iraq, on November 16.
|
Islamic State (aka ISIS) is a murderous enterprise based on an insane
ideology. It nevertheless desires its own survival and expansion.
In October, prior to the downing of the Russian jet over Sinai and the
attacks last week in Paris, no serious threat to its continued existence
was apparent. The US-led coalition bombing campaign was halfhearted, and
Western support for Kurdish and Arab elements engaged in conflict with
Islamic State was clearly intended to contain, rather than destroy, it.
By its own actions, Islamic State has now altered this calculus. Why
might it have chosen to do so, and what is this likely to mean for the
next phase of the conflict in Iraq and Syria (and now metastasizing
beyond it)? The bombings in Paris constitute the latest act in a turn
toward international terrorism by Islamic State that began in the summer
of this year. It claimed responsibility for a bombing of a Shi'a mosque
in Kuwait on June 26. But the first really substantial evidence of this
turn was the attack on July 21 on a Kurdish community center in the town
of Suruc, close to the Syrian-Turkish border. This attack was clearly
intended as a strike at the "underbelly" of an enemy that
formed the main barrier to Islamic State's ambitions in northern Syria.
The Suruc bombing was followed in subsequent months by Islamic State
acts of terrorism in Ankara against a pro-Kurdish demonstration, over the
Sinai against the Russian Metrojet Flight 9268, in south Beirut against
the Hezbollah-controlled Borj al-Barajneh area, and now in Paris.
ISIS terror attacks have targeted
those fighting on one level or another the Islamic State.
|
The tactical motivation for these attacks is fairly obvious. In all
cases, the attacks are against forces or countries engaged on one level
or another against Islamic State.
Islamic State has lost around 20-25 percent of its holdings in the
course of the last half year. But these losses are manageable. Indeed,
the group has in recent weeks continued to expand in a western direction,
across the desert to Palmyra and thence into Homs province in Syria. Why,
then, embark on a path that risks the destruction of Islamic State at the
hands of forces incomparably stronger than it?
The answer is that Islamic State does not, like some other
manifestations of political Islam in the region, combine vast strategic
goals with a certain tactical patience and pragmatism. Rather, existing
at the most extreme point of the Sunni Islamist continuum, it is a
genuine apocalyptic cult. It has little interest in being left alone to
create a model of Islamic governance according to its own lights, as its
Western opponents had apparently hoped.
Islamic State has lost around
20-25 percent of its territorial holdings in the last half year.
|
Its slogan is "baqiya wa tatamaddad" (remaining and
expanding). The latter is as important an imperative as the former.
Islamic State must constantly remain in motion and in kinetic action.
If this action results in Western half-measures and prevarication,
then this will exemplify the weakness of the enemy to Islamic State
supporters and spur further recruitment and further attacks. And if
resolve and pushback are exhibited by the enemy, these, too, can be
welcomed as part of the process intended to result in the final
apocalyptic battles which are part of the Islamic State eschatology.
Because of this, allowing Islamic State to quietly fester in its
Syrian and Iraqi domains is apparently not going to work.
Western half-measures signal
weakness to ISIS supporters, spurring recruitment and further attacks.
|
The problem and consequent dilemma for Western policy-makers are that
Islamic State is only a symptom, albeit a particularly virulent one, of a
much larger malady. Were it not so, the matter of destroying a brutal,
ramshackle entity in the badlands of Syria and Iraq would be fairly
simple. A Western expeditionary force on the ground could achieve it in a
matter of weeks and would presumably be welcomed by a grateful
population.
This, however, is unlikely to be attempted, precisely because the real
(but rarely stated) problem underlying Islamic State is the popularity
and legitimacy of virulently anti-Western Sunni Islamist politics among
the Sunni Arab populations of the area.
This is evidenced by the fact that the greater part of the Syrian
Sunni Arab rebellion also consists of Sunni Islamist or jihadi forces,
many of them not a great deal less extreme than Islamic State. The most
powerful rebel coalition, Jaysh al-Fatah, for example, is a union between
al-Qaida (Jabhat al-Nusra), the Muslim Brotherhood and local Salafi elements.
As the Iraq insurgency and the Syrian and Palestinian examples show,
the tendency of popular and street-level Arab politics in the Levant and
Iraq is to take the form of violent politicized religion. As a result,
any Western force entering Islamic State territory as a liberator would
rapidly come to be considered an occupying force and would be the subject
of attacks.
It is possible that because of this, Western policy will continue to
follow the path of least resistance, as evidenced by the French bombing
of Raqqa this week. Such bombings may serve to sate an understandable
feeling of rage and desire for revenge on the part of the French public,
but they will do little to degrade, much less dislodge, Islamic State.
ISIS can only be fully defeated
through effective partnering with reliable local forces.
|
Islamic state is part of a larger process whereby Iraq and Syria have
collapsed and fragmented into their component parts, and vicious
sectarian war among their ruins is taking place. If Western policy-
makers conclude that even given the continued existence of this larger
process, Islamic State is a particular manifestation that must be wiped
out, and if they seriously wish to pursue this policy, how might it be
achieved, given the determination to avoid a Western ground invasion for
the reasons noted above? The answer is through the effective partnering
with reliable local forces, which could be persuaded, bribed or induced
to undertake the military task of destroying Islamic State, in
cooperation with Western air power.
The obvious candidates to undertake such a task would be the powerful
Kurdish military organizations in both Iraq and Syria, presumably with a
leavening or decoration of Arab fighters (Sunni Arab tribal forces in
Anbar, small Free Syrian Army-associated groups in Syria, and so on) for
appearance's sake and for holding the area following the destruction of
Islamic State.
Kurdish forces have the potential
capacity to defeat ISIS, but need political inducements.
|
Kurdish successes in cooperation with US air power in both northeast
Syria and northern Iraq provide the blueprint for such a path.
The problem here, of course, is that the Kurds, reliable as they are,
have little or no motivation for risking the lives of their fighters in
the probably thankless task of providing the backbone for a ground
assault on Islamic State.
This problem is not insurmountable, but it would require a strategy
able to provide sufficient political inducements for the Kurds. This
would almost certainly have to include support for Kurdish statehood or a
very entrenched version of "sovereignty- minus."
Turkish concerns would of course become a factor here. Syrian-Kurdish
agreement to remain east of the Euphrates seems to have calmed Ankara,
for now. But Turkey's agenda in Syria, and in particular the problematic
support offered by Turkey to jihadi elements there, remains a factor
awaiting attention.
What is most urgent is a clear understanding that both Iraq and Syria
as unitary states have ceased to exist, that part of a successful
strategy must include thinking about what replaces them, and that the way
to challenge the negative elements active among their ruins is by
supporting the positive elements.
The weeks ahead will indicate whether such a strategy is in the
process of being formulated.
Jonathan Spyer is director of the
Rubin Center for Research in International Affairs and a fellow at the
Middle East Forum.
|
|
|
|
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment