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IT HAS been a busy two months for the Islamic State (IS), the vicious Sunni Muslim extremist group that operates in Syria and Iraq. On June 29th, a fortnight after taking over Mosul, Iraq’s second city, it declared a caliphate, claiming to speak for the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. It then battled its way towards Baghdad where the Shia-dominated government sits. At the start of August, IS turned north towards Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region and towns home to minorities on the way, attacking Christians, Yazidis and fellow Sunnis, and threatening to reach Erbil, the Kurdish capital. That led Barack Obama, America’s president, to authorise airstrikes against the group which began on August 8th. Meanwhile, in neighbouring Syria, IS has also been expanding westwards.
The Islamic State, known previously as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, ISIS or ISIL, grew out of remnants of the Islamic State in Iraq, a brutal group that led attacks against the American-led coalition forces after the 2003 invasion. By 2011, when the Americans withdrew, the group had been weakened by the Sahwa—Sunni groups paid to fight them—and targeted assassinations of their leaders. But the remaining fighters continued to extort money in Mosul and carry out attacks in Iraq. The vacuum created by Syria’s civil war from 2011 was a big boon, allowing surviving members to regroup and recruit next door. With headquarters in Raqqa, in eastern Syria, and extortion rackets in Mosul, it grew in power. Thanks to disgruntled Sunnis in Iraq willing to ally with IS (after being excluded by the government in Baghdad) and a brittle Iraqi security force that fled in the face of the assault, IS, by now composed of thousands of men, including many foreign fighters, managed to grab swathes of territory in Iraq.
So how is IS faring today? Although IS’s brutal ideology is rejected by most Muslims who see them as criminals, fighters have flocked to the group since June—6,000 in Syria alone by some estimates. IS has grabbed oil fields, army bases and more weaponry (including American goodies in Iraq). Although American airstrikes have pushed it back in northern areas from Mount Sinjar and Mosul Dam, Iraq’s largest, Barack Obama has made clear that he is not planning to try to rout the group. To rout IS, Iraq’s Sunnis must turn against it. In Syria, there is almost no check on IS’s actions. Although Syria’s regime of Bashar Assad has belatedly started to carry out strikes against the group, Syria rebels who have battled with IS since January find they are no match for the group. On August 24th IS took Tabaqa air base from the regime after a week of seizing a string of rebel-held villages near Aleppo.
Jihadist groups normally tend to prove bad at governance, lose civilian support and falter in their most ambitious aims, such as state building. But the rise of extreme Islamist ideology and the multiple vacuums in the Arab world allow such groups to survive at least well enough to makes a nuisance of themselves, including Yemen’s al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and jihadists in Mali. Western officials describe IS as stronger and more sophisticated than all of these, amounting in some estimations to the biggest security threat facing the region since 9/11. Syria’s war has no end in sight; Iraq remains in a mess. So even in the best-case scenario IS is likely to be active for generations to come. And the problem is not just for Syria, Iraq and its neighbours. With thousands of foreign fighters from across the world who may return home as radicalised rebels, many countries are at risk.
Dig deeper:
If the Islamic State is to be stopped in Iraq, it must be stopped in Syria too (August 23rd 2014)
By combining military force with political brinkmanship, America is making some headway (August 16th 2014)
The failures of the Arab spring were a long time in the making (July 4th 2014)
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A poor post by Economist standards. Amounts to a personal armchair commentary/repetition of what we already know from the news. Nothing new at all
with this title, I was hoping for some analysis of how the IS is doing in terms of support from its population. How effective is it, for example, in providing law and order for the people it doesn't kill or scares away? Is it providing social services, health care, education? Is it setting up some kind of administration or is it just a bunch of fighters calling themselves a state?
Sherman’s 300,000 and the Caliphate’s 3 Million
by David Goldman
August 12th, 2014
General William Tecumseh Sherman burned the city of Atlanta in 1864. He warned: “I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them.” Add a zero to calibrate the problem in the Levant today. War in the Middle East is less a strategic than a demographic phenomenon, whose resolution will come with the exhaustion of the pool of potential fighters. ...
How does one handle wars of this sort? In 2008 I argued for a “Richelovian” foreign policy, that is, emulation of the evil genius who guided France to victory at the conclusion of the Thirty Years War in 1648. Wars of this sort end when two generations of fighters are killed. They last for decades (as did the Peloponnesian War, the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars of the 20th century) because one kills off the fathers die in the first half of the war, and the sons in the second.
This new Thirty Years War has its origins in a demographic peak and an economic trough. There are nearly 30 million young men aged 15 to 24 in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, a bulge generation produced by pre-modern fertility rates that prevailed a generation ago. But the region’s economies cannot support them. Syria does not have enough water to support an agricultural population, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of farmers into tent cities preceded its civil war. The West mistook the death spasms of a civilization for an “Arab Spring,” and its blunders channeled the youth bulge into a regional war.
The way to win such a war is by attrition, that is, by feeding into the meat-grinder a quarter to a third of the enemy’s available manpower. Once a sufficient number of who wish to fight to the death have had the opportunity to do so, the war stops because there are insufficient recruits to fill the ranks. That is how Generals Grant and Sherman fought the American Civil War, and that is the indicated strategy in the Middle East today.
It is a horrible business. ...
Three million men will have to die before the butchery comes to an end. That is roughly the number of men who have nothing to go back to, and will fight to the death rather than surrender. ...
Interesting. The only omission being that only a few months back, it enjoyed the support of that ubiquitous warmonger-in-chief, a.k.a Senator John McCain, who posed for a photograph with the group's now self-appointed "caliph" in Syria. Indeed, wasn't it supposed to be part of Hilary Clinton's much-vaunted "democratic alliance" against Assad too (the other democrats being the Saudis and other Arabian Gulf fiefdoms who, with America's encouragement, also supplied them with weapons and cash)?
But what a fool I am. Because to this day, the mainstream media has studiously avoided even the suggestion that Mr bin-Laden's mujaheddin in Afghanistan (trained, armed and funded by Reagan and Thatcher) ever had anything to do with its direct offspring, al-Qaeda - and thus with 9/11 and other atrocities.
Who was it that once said that the worst kind of censorship is the self-imposed variety?
Not only will the West be ineffectual in stemming the Syrian Civil War, doing nothing is in the West's best interest.
And doing 'something' will make it an international cause for world wide terrorists for generations of embittered angry Muslims to attack the West.
This problem can only be solved in the Muslim World...or left to burn itself out in natural course.
I assure you it will end...We just don't know when: 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years.
Don't fight Syria when it is fighting itself in bloody, brutal, savage warfare everyday:
No Geneva War Conventions. No Human Rights. No prisoners, just prompt execution.
The War with Iran goes through Syria.
The US should leave Syria in peace. Syria is punishing itself more viciously than Western armies could every do.
Now Iran wants peace. Iran is being sandwiched by internal and external pressures and is on the precipice of breaking down. The economy is in a Great Depression. Any delay is killing them.
Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself.
For the West, doing nothing is winning.
Thoughtfully doing nothing is sometimes the wisest action.
As in poker, know when to hold’ em, know when to fold’em, know when to walk away, know when to run.
Call it “actively observing”.
----
Call me a ‘peacnik’, but I advocate negotiated diplomatic settlement involving all parties, based on the respect of universal human rights, a strict cease fire, ban of all civilian violence, generous welfare relief, UN vaccination clinics, and resumption of confidence building measures.
In short: Fantasyland.
---
Syrians will get Peace only when they really want it.
Like all Arabs, more important than Peace is Revenge. It is written in the Koran.
And a strategic balance of Syrian Regime vs Jihadists will keep the World at Peace.
WHEN the Syrian Equilibrium is upset and one side wins, expect Pandora's Box of Terrorists to be free to cause world wide havoc that will make 9/11 look like child's play.
Best to box them in and keep them in as the World's Largest Prison: Guantanamo Mideast.
Contain it absolutely.
Boxed in by Turkey to the North, Shiite Iran to the East, the Mediterranean to the West, and Israel to the South.
Fortified walls like prison.
Let roaches in but do not let them check out.
Not war, but containment.
When your enemies are both slaughtering each other, the best strategy is to do nothing.
And let them slaughter each other.
I think that the proposal by the mayor of London is to be taken in serious consideration. Anybody that goes to that region and cannot prove any legitimate reason for it, should have his/her citizenship nullified and the passport confiscated. If anyone from Europe decide to go to that region, he should automatically become a foreigner that needs a visa to enter the EU. I am sure that would cut the number of jihadists from the EU drastically.
It amazes me that there is almost no recognition of the fact that the rulers of the Sunni-majority states in the region (Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and the six GCC states) are perfectly content for IS to cause havoc in areas ostensibly or previously controlled by an Iranian-backed Shia dominated government (Iraq) or by an Iranian ally (Syria) or by the Kurds. However, when the jihadists cause trouble elsewhere their wings are clipped (e.g., UAE bombing Libya jihadists with Egyptian support). Any attempt at unsettling the current governance of Jordan would likely encounter a similar response. Even if popular revolts (the Arab Spring) and the West (primarily he US and the UK) inadvertlently created the vacuum which IS has filled, it is the primary responsibility of the surrounding states to deal with it. And deal with they will if their rulers perceive that their hegemony is being threatened.
"Jihadist groups normally tend to prove bad at governance, lose civilian support and falter in their most ambitious aims, such as state building. "
Erm... Hamas? Hezbollah??
A Sectarian Sunni-Shia Civil War or SU-SHI War is inevitable and it may be in the West's Best Interest:
-Syria and Iran are bankrupting themselves by wasting billions in foreign currency reserves in fighting an all out war for survival. They have squandered all their diplomatic good will, peace loving propaganda, Arab brotherhood, and religious integrity.
-Syria and Iran are alienating themselves from their neighboring Sunni Arabs, Kurds, and Turks.
-Minority Shia--only 10% of the Muslim world--are poking the other 90% Sunni in the eye with a stick.
-The Muslim world has become polarized into Sunni and Shia and it is threatening war. There is no room to hate Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhist or other infidels.
Muslim spleen is diverted from the West into rival Muslim Sects. Local Tribes. Rival Neighbors.
-Syria is no longer meddling with its neighbors with covert political terrorism as in Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and Iraq.
-Terrorists are concentrating their destruction in Syria and no longer targeting the West.
-Al Qaeda has down graded America as a target: The #1 target is now Syria.
-Russia is throwing rubles down a rathole with no hope of repayment.
-Russia has squandered its good will with the EU, Arabs and America on its insistence in backing a madman brutal dictator.
-Russian intransigence in the UN, has made US and China closer. And EU and China closer. China no longer stands with intransigent UN Security Council Vetoes.
-Turkey is no longer boasting about its success story of a being a bridge of modernity and Islam. It is very fearful of its neighbors: Syria, Kurdistan and Russia. And it is cooperating more with NATO, the EU and the US.
-Terrorists are killing themselves in brutal combat. A generation of terrorists are being annihilated .It is the world’s biggest Terrorist Graveyard of the 21st Century.
-Hezbollah is being decimated fighting seasoned Al Qaeda fighters with honed bombing, sniper and terrorism skills. Fighting a counter insurgency takes far more discipline than conducting a guerilla war. And it is costly to be the ‘good guy’.
-Hezbollah is ignoring the conflict with Israel leading to record low conflict incidents and no rocket attacks.
-There is a youth time bomb in the Muslim world that was the basis for the Arab Spring. War is consuming young lives. War is population control by other means.
-Arab conflicts and instability has generated record trade in farm commodity produce. And arms. The commodity export markets are BOOMING.
-There is no illusion of Peaceful Islam: 1000 Syrians are dying violently each week.
-There is no illusion of Universal Muslim Brotherhood: 5 million Syrian refugees are being ignored by rich Arab Sheiks in nearby neighbors.
-Iran's Nuclear program is held up by diverted resources to supply Hezbollah and Syria. Syria has achieved what the UN and IAEF could never do.
-The Muslims are killing other Muslims. That is tragic.
But it is far more acceptable to the Muslim world than having Christians or Westerners being accused of killing innocent, peace-loving Muslims.
-Cost is less important in a proxy war.
Bottomless funding from oil: Russia and Iran on one side.
Gulf Emirates and Saudi Princes on the other side.
However the cost in blood, life and limb will be the Syrian People.
The Lebanese civil war lasted over 20 years.
Iraq civil war will continue for its second decade.
The Afghanistan War is lasting generations.
In recent geopolitics, Muslims only become brothers in uniting to fight foreign Crusaders.
I do not think this trade off is worthwhile.
In the Mideast, conflicts tend to last for generations.
This Syrian Civil War will be generational.
And chronic. Your grandkid’s grandkids will be stuck with this problem.
Outside of Kurdistan, which is already at war with IS, there are six Shiites for every Sunni in Iraq. If the Iraqi Sunni maintain active support for IS, they will be slaughtered.
American air power has two things to do. First, make it impossible for IS to fight like an army by destroying any significant concentrations of troops. Second, destroy their heavy weapons. The hatred of those around them will see to the rest.
Around for generations? I think not. Around for a few more months at best. Unfortunately for them, they have brought too much attention to themselves. The most successful and long lived brutal regimes tend to keep to themselves, i.e. North Korea the "Hermit Kingdom". The established world order will just bomb ISIS until they're all dead.
I totally agree with the solution. As I wrote in a previous comment US armed forces should jump at any opportunity to kill islamic terrorists. I'd also set quotas and a useful competition between different branches. Extensive usage of drones should help reduce risks to the minimum (why give ragheads a chance?)
Sharks can only swim in a compliant sea. If the Muslims themselves do not rise to resist this threat they will be consumed by it.
Hey, I've been saying for years that the US should just bomb which ever side is winning.
We tried that in Vietnam, remember? Attrition is only viable when the fear of death outweighs the ideology of the opposing force. Islamic fundamentalism as a warfare ideology has repeatedly proven to be a stronger motivator than fear of death, after all.
Not to mention, the tactic of guerrilla warfare has limited the efficacy of attrition warfare. It may be easy to try and rack up casualties when two disparate forces meet on a field of battle, but it's another story when your enemy hides in the jungle, in tunnels, and in mountain caves, waiting to spring ambushes and set off traps with minimal risk to the guerrilla combatants. I suppose one could carry the attrition to the civilian population, but methinks that would simply breed MORE terrorists, thereby doing the exact opposite that attrition is intended to achieve.
this piece reads like a cia briefing prepared before all this mess started in the middle east. this was foreseen well in advance by critics of the arab spring and all that stuff.
I think it would be better if European nations and the USA would stand back a bit and let other nations in the Middle East get involved.
Why is there no pan-Arab or Arab League force to defeat the Islamic State ? Saudi-Arabia has called the Islamic State a grave threat, but is doing nothing, apart from giving Lebanon's army US$ 1 bn., although it has a very well equipped military, with F-15 Strike Eagles, Eurofighters, Tornado's, AWACS planes and so on. The other Gulf States also have a well equipped military and could bankroll a military operation.
Why are western nations always supposed to get involved or called upon to sort out the mess in the Middle East ?
They call it "the religion of peace, tolerance, and justice".
bampbs wrote, "If the Iraqi Sunni maintain active support for IS, they will be slaughtered." The Economist (E) wrote, "To rout IS, Iraq's Sunnis must turn against it." E's comment is more poignant but both E and bampbs are correct to highlight the Sunni posture as important.
When the so called Iraqi Army was pushed out of Mosul and Tikrit in June 2014, remnants of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athists were key to that outcome, as they collaborated with IS. Ba'athist do not use that label now, but they maintain critical political and military capital in the Sunni Triangle. The King of Clubs (al Douri) is the most widely recognized leader. ----
Obama is enamored with "an inclusive Iraqi government." I think that is a pipe dream. The Baghdad government/army can not kill a ladybug. Two weeks ago it tried to take Tikrit, but failed to cross a street.
IS must be killed now. Some within IS will concentrate of the caliphate. Others will want to blow up western embassies around the world, shoot down passenger jets, and sink cruise ships. ---US air power is a key element and the US will probably use special forces, if the strike force advances to the "20 yard line." There has to be a local component to the strike force, which will hold and govern the territory after IS. The US should collaborate with the King of Clubs or some other capable leader/entity like the King of Clubs. (Saddam was once our partner; he attacked Iran at our behest.) The new Sunni dominated state should extend from Tikrit to Raqqa. Lasting peace is more important than artificial borders.
For now, this is a sideshow.
The real action that will change the world is occuring in Ukraine.
There's an invasion by Russia that has been going on since spring...
But The Economist is more worried about Islam.
NSFTL
Regards