THINKING CLEARLY ABOUT ISIS

THINKING CLEARLY ABOUT ISIS

Ronald Tiersky

August 3, 2017

RealClearWorld

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed (July 20, A17), West Points Maj. John Spencer wrote:

The battle for Mosul represents the future of warfareand it wasnt prettyA rag-tag army of a few thousand Islamic State fighters managed to hold the city for months against some 100,000 U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces.

The numbers are important: a few thousand vs. a hundred thousand when ISIS was finally destroyed in Mosul. The description as well: rag-tag, that is, motley, disorganized, crude.

In its glory period 2014-15, ISIS seized Mosul with all the U.S. military equipment there, including heavy weapons, as well as millions of dollars in the banks.

Today ISIS is losing all over Iraq and, even if more slowly, in Syria as well. Its a good time to think in retrospect and looking ahead about how accurately ISIS was understood.

Heres a primer of end-of-days questions about Islamic State military forces and occupation governments:

1. The numbers: How many fighters total does Islamic State still have in the field? To what extent are local groupings still in contact with each other or is ISIS broken into pieces?

2. New recruits. Arriving foreign fighters getting into Syria each month in 2016 had dropped to the tens or low hundreds, some reports said fifty, no longer the thousands of 2014-2015. Estimates were that 30,000-40,000 foreign fighters from 86 countries had arrived over two years. (Washington Post, September 9, 2016, Griff Witte, Sudarsan Raghaven and James McAuley). But the American commander, Lt. Gen. Sean McFarland, said that 35,000-45,000 fighters overall had been killed. (General: 45,000 ISIS fighters killed in two years, The Hill, August 11, 2017, Kristin Wong.) Many others fled the battlefield either back to civilian life or to home countries to become sleeper cells. Many of the original Iraqi and Syrian fighters were also killed.

Whats the result? A rough guess is that there are perhaps 10,000 ISIS fighters still in the field scattered across Iraq and Syria. Some number, perhaps a few dozen, are killed each week. Perhaps more.

3. Mosul. How many fighters held Mosul at the top: perhaps 6,000 holding a city which at the beginning had a population of one and a half to two million people. ISIS control of Mosul was in effect the largest hostage operation in history. At the end about 200-300 remained, mainly foreign fighters, almost all in the Old City. (Iraq commander: Mosul battle to take three more weeks, Arab News, May 1, 2017, republished by Reuters.)

4. How many fighters are left in Raqqa? A few thousand it seems. Many others have fled along with a substantial number of leaders and their families. (U.S.-backed forces close to trapping ISIS holdouts in Raqqa, New York Times, July 2, 2017, Michael Gordon). The Syrian eastern province of Deir al-Zour is Islamic States last bastion.

Yet Maj. Spencers point remains as a warning about the future of war: a few hundred or thousand fighters can hold off an army in urban fighting for a substantial time, if only because they are using innocent civilians as shields.

Do remaining ISIS fighters feel demoralized, abandoned? No doubt. They still fight to the death, but for personal honor in relation to jihad rather than for the caliphate. Perhaps the dream of paradise, once Islamic States most formidable weapon, still has some luster.

5. The leader. Is so-called caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi still alive? Russia and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights say hes probably dead. U.S. defense secretary Jim Mattis said last week that he thought Baghdadi is still alive. Does it any longer matter very much? Giving your life for Abu Bakr used to persuade the gullible but its doubtful Baghdadi still has much credibility.

6. Ammunition. What about an asset as banal as ammunition. Are ISIS forces running out of ammunition? Re-supply? Where do they get their ammunition now?

7. What about the famous swaths of territory ISIS once controlled? How can this be when there remain at most a few thousand fighters and limited weapons and logistical equipment? Large armies couldnt control such territories in the past.

8. What is the meaning of control anyway?

A top U.S. official said at a recent closed meeting that in U.S. military vocabulary control means an area in which ISIS forces can move freely and return to secure bases. Is this really control? If control means an empty territory in which not just ISIS but any military force can circulate freely, these swaths of ISIS-controlled territory are really just empty space. And since much of Iraq and Syria is uninhabited desert, whats the point of controlling it anyway?

9. Where ISIS still holds villages along the two rivers, how many fighters are in each? Five, ten, a hundred? Not very many in any case. Significant attacking forces will kill or otherwise dislodge them with dispatch. ISIS fighters are sitting ducks waiting to be killed.

10. Control of waterways is essentially to Iraqi and Syrian life. A look at the original ISIS blitzkrieg shows well-conceived strategy. Control of the Tabqa dam above Raqqa was a critical threat if, as seemed plausible, ISIS fanaticism might blow it to create a flood. This threat also protected the top leadership and high value ISIS captives kept there. In Iraq, ISIS took control of much of the Euphrates by capturing villages on the riverbanks.

11. Chain of command. Does any broad chain of command still exist at the strategic level? Hardly likely. Is ISIS cunningly re-orienting its strategy from territory to guerrilla warfare as some commentators believe? Hardly convincing. With Islamic State in tatters, terrorist bombs and killings are a matter of doing what its fighters still can dopointless massacre.

12. Conclusion: the future of ISIS is permanently on the run. Remaining commanders and fighters are going to ground in desert areas to reorganize some new guerrilla force, perhaps with a new name, perhaps merged with other forces such as Al Qaeda offshoots. They did it successfully once before.

But ISIS resurgence cannot be camouflaged, the element of surprise is gone. In Iraq it will be run down by experienced Iraqi security forces and, in Syria, a collection of anti-ISIS groups including the Assad government, however much these groups are also fighting each other. Assads strategy of posing as a lesser threat compared to ISIS dissolves if ISIS no longer exists.

Al Qaeda will also be on the run despite its long game strategy of gradual taking over communities from within.

Governments will not be surprised again nor will they permit ungoverned areas to form, which are in nobodys interest. Russias first goal in Syria, Vladimir Putin said many times, was to prevent another Libya on its borders. Iraqi and Syrian patchwork governments will be active. Equally or more important outside states will be vigilantRussia but also the U.S., Iran, Turkey, Jordan, Israel and the Arab Sunni states. The key to suppressing ISIS, Al Qaeda or any other jihadist group is to keep them from taking cities.

Islamic State, the murderous blip-on-the-screen so-called caliphate, is going down. Almost certainly this will terminate territorial jihad in core world countries for the foreseeable future.

THE KEY IS TO PREVENT JIHADISTS FROM TAKING CITIES. ISIS VICTORY AT MOSUL WAS A MONUMENTAL LUCKY BREAK. IT MADE ISLAMIC STATE A DURABLE ENTERPRISE. IRAQI FORCES RAN AWAY FROM A FIGHT WITH A SMALL BUT TERRIFYING ATTACKING FORCE. ITS FAILURE ENDED IN THE RUIN OF THEIR COUNTRY.

But what about peripheral areas? Guerrilla and urban terrorist jihadists will persist in various countries such as the Philippines, Nigeria, the Sinai, Afghanistan, etc. Some will claim to be ISIS affiliates fighting to re-establish a caliphate but their most important motives will be local struggles for power and money.

Lone-wolf attacks will continue in Europe and the U.S. but without strategic or even tactical significance. These are massacre not politics. Enough experience has accumulated showing that public opinion is terrorized for a moment but life goes on the next day. (Statistically in the U.S. there have been only two serious terrorist attacks in the past several years, San Bernardino and Orlando, involving a total of three individuals.) Nevertheless, counter-terrorism remains a vital task of Western governments.

Thinking clear about the future of ISIS, military analyst Anthony Cordesman says, We are months away at most from the point at which ISIS ceases to be the focus of Iraqi security and stability. (RealClearWorld, U.S. Strategic interests and the rise of Prince Mohammed bin Salman, June 22, 2017).

What about killing the ideology? Eradicating the idea of violent jihad to create an international Muslim power?

Jihad and the caliphate are, like any religious or political movement, at bottom an idea. Bad ideas degenerate sooner or later, like Communism. Or are destroyed, like the Third Reich. Or burn themselves out: chattel slavery is a good example, or Alexander the Greats idea of universal empire.

ISIS/Islamic States fanatical agenda is just the most recent version of an ancient, homicidal fantasy.