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Is
ISIS Good at Governing?
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To explain the troubles ISIS faces at home, we have
invited a group of scholars to comment on its governance over the past
years and speculate on what it might face in the year ahead. First was Mara
Revkin,
who examined how opinions towards ISIS have changed since it captured Mosul
more than a year ago. Next up is Aymenn al-Tamimi, a Jihad-Intel research
fellow at the Middle East Forum, who argues that internal documents show
increasing challenges for the Islamic State.
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The
ISIS Department of Education in Raqqa, Syria.
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There are a variety of ways to assess Islamic State (or ISIS)
governance over its territories. One angle involves trying to talk to
residents living within ISIS-controlled lands, and indeed this is the
primary line of evidence Mara Revkin relies on in her piece assessing
ISIS administration.
While oral testimony may produce some interesting observations on ISIS
governance, it is also beset with difficulties in reliability and
corroboration. The ISIS system of rule is a totalitarian dictatorship, on
the lookout for anyone who could be deemed to be collaborating with the
outside world. As such, residents may be reluctant to criticize, out of
fear that they could be accused of leaking information harmful to ISIS.
That can get a person disappeared or publicly executed.
Last year, when I was speaking with a friend living in the western
Anbar town of Rawa, he initially said that most residents preferred life
under ISIS:
We are not content like before but I and most of the
people here prefer living under the shade of the Islamic State, as no
soldier comes upon our lands, and now I assure you that all the people of
Rawa will fight in one rank against the [Iraqi] army if it tries to
advance an inch because the army won't have mercy on anyone...and this is
the truth...and I give you knowledge of the sentiment among most of the
people who were persecuted by the army but had committed no crime or
fault, but we only lack [national grid] electricity.
At first glance, his sentiments seem quite understandable. Harassment,
mass arrests, and disappearances in prisons of Iraqi Sunnis by the
Baghdad government's security forces were common grievances—maybe they
have more weight than loss of access to public services like the national
electricity grid, from which most areas under IS control have now been
cut off.
Yet in a subsequent conversation, in which I inquired about any
publications ISIS had distributed in his area, the fear of ISIS became
very apparent:
Brother, you know why I am cautious in giving you
information: because the Internet is being monitored. And I want to know
what you will do with it and whether this thing will harm the Dawla
[ISIS], because after God Almighty and Exalted is He, we don't have
anything besides the Islamic State, and I fear having a [negative] effect
on them.
Another resident of Rawa refused to discuss anything about life in the
town, with the same concern about Internet communication being monitored
by ISIS.
These examples offer a glimpse into the challenges of understanding
ISIS administration through local testimony. How can we be sure the
testimony is not compromised on account of fear? It is of course possible
to find people critical of ISIS living within its territories: for
instance, a relative in Mosul told me a year ago that 90 percent of the
city's inhabitants prefer life before ISIS, but said fear prevents them
from expressing their true feelings. But how does one even verify that
claim?
Cracks in the
system
With clear shortcomings in oral testimony, I prefer to focus instead
on internal ISIS documents to understand the evolution in governance—as
well as problems facing ISIS that we don't see in the endless streams of
propaganda. To be sure, this method also has limitations: though I have
managed to compile hundreds of documents so far, they likely
constitute only a small fraction of the whole cache. Only if the ISIS
project collapses with loss of major strongholds like Raqqa and Mosul—and
hopefully the capture of tens of thousands of documents—will we get a
fuller picture.
Only if the ISIS project
collapses, with the capture of tens of thousands of documents, will we
get a fuller picture.
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Even so, the documents unearthed so far yield a number of important
insights. The ISIS bureaucracy is ostensibly comprehensive and
impressive, but it is clear that as time progresses, the state project is
facing challenges due to pressure from its enemies.
For example, in mid-2015, the agricultural department issued a general
notification urging people to conserve grain stocks on account of the
"economic war" being waged by the coalition against ISIS,
indicating that agricultural output in ISIS territories was in trouble.
In addition, while ISIS makes no secret of its appeals for medical
personnel to come to the caliphate, internal documents show that
brain-drain is also a problem: multiple ultimatums have been issued, calling for
medical professionals to return to ISIS lands or risk having their
property confiscated.
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An
IS document warns medical professionals to report to work or face
arrest and confiscation of property.
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While ISIS would like to cultivate a new generation of professionals,
the only real existing institution is Mosul University, which practically
remains open only to Iraqi students. ISIS closed some departments on the
grounds of contravening its ideology, and even those that remain open
cannot function, likely owing to the wider issue of brain drain.
Documents also show great concern about the anti-ISIS coalition's
ability to launch airstrikes on high-profile targets. Worried about data
security, the ISIS leadership increasingly attempts to restrict all
broadcasting of information to its own channels. It has warned fighters
and commanders not to open social media accounts or use mobiles, and
recently banned satellite television.
Cash rules
everything
Finally, for all the criticisms of the anti-ISIS coalition's strategies,
it is clear that they have significantly dented the group's financial
revenues. The Iraqi government no longer pays salaries of workers living
under ISIS rule, airstrikes have hit ISIS-owned assets in the oil
industry, Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) have taken the key
Syria-Turkey border point of Tel Abyad, and Turkey has tightened security
on remaining border areas under ISIS control.
As a result, ISIS has reduced expenditures and increased taxation on
its populations. In Mosul, for instance, ISIS imposed all costs for
printing textbooks on school students. From Raqqa province, a memo dating
to November/December 2015 established a 50 percent pay cut for all
fighters, regardless of rank. The latter pointed to "the exceptional
circumstances" ISIS is facing (referring, no doubt, to financial
troubles). This is particularly significant as a financial budget I obtained from Deir az-Zor province
shows that military upkeep—primarily in the form of fighters'
salaries—can be reasonably estimated to account for two-thirds of ISIS
expenditures. These pay cuts may exacerbate problems of military cohesion
in ISIS's ranks—evidenced by a month-long general amnesty issued in
October 2015 for deserters, and the failures of mobilization efforts to
stop the Assad regime and Iran from breaking the ISIS siege of Kweiris
airbase in Aleppo province.
Bring the
fight home
For all of these insights into internal challenges for the ISIS
project, I deem the prospect of collapse from an internal revolt
unlikely. It is evident that internal opponents of ISIS face a stifling
environment, and no one to date has offered them an alternative model of
governance. Any internal uprisings that do occur—such as the Sha'itat
revolt in Deir az-Zor province back in 2014—have been put down with
ruthless efficiency. From the economic side, the group's financial
difficulties are unlikely to translate into total collapse, as it's impossible
to completely seal off cash flow between ISIS and the outside world.
All of this shows that it will be up to outside forces to take the
fight against ISIS to its heartlands.
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a
research fellow at Middle East Forum's Jihad Intel project.
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