Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State (9 page)

As things stand in early 2015, Western countries (several, including the United States, now with severely reduced international credibility) face a larger, more unified, capable, experienced and savage enemy, in a less stable, more fragmented region. It isn’t just ISIS – AQ has emerged from its eclipse and is back in the game in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Syria and Yemen. We’re dealing with not one, but two global terrorist organisations, each with its own regional branches, plus a vastly larger radicalised population at home and a massive flow of foreign fighters.

We’re also facing a revival of great-power military confrontation in the Pacific and Eastern Europe, which, far from being coincidental, is a direct result of the way failures in Iraq and Afghanistan telegraphed the limits of Western power and showed adversaries exactly how to fight us. We’re seeing an escalating Sunni–Shi’a proxy conflict – once a cold war, but getting hotter by the day – in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, a conflict that’s drawing battle lines between Iran and its allies on the one hand, and a fractious coalition of Sunni states, led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, on the other. As journalist James Traub puts it, “America has abdicated its guiding role in the middle east to a sectarian Arab military force – what could [possibly] go wrong?” Whether or not we think it’s feasible (or proper, or sustainable) for the United States to assume a “guiding role,” the reality is that Western leaders have little appetite for any role at all in the region, let alone for more conflict. People are tired – I know I am – and just want it all to be over. This is a far from ideal position in which to face such a wide range of resurgent threats.

As I’ve explained, there’s plenty of blame to go around. President Bush conflated enemies, defaulted to attacking states rather than thinking about how to deal with non-state actors, and – mother of errors – invaded Iraq, and then botched the occupation. He waited far too long to engage with the problem, and however good his performance during the Surge, it came at a huge opportunity cost. President Obama compounded Bush’s errors – pulling out of Iraq without putting in enough effort to cement the gains of the Surge, indulging a dangerous addiction to drones and special ops, acting opportunistically in Libya, remaining passive in the face of massacre in Syria, calling his own bluff on Assad’s chemical weapons and failing to grasp the significance of ISIS, support secular rebels in Syria or address the fragility of Maliki’s Iraq until far too late. Allies, too – the United Kingdom, other NATO countries, Arab states, Australia – went along with whatever was asked of them, made only limited efforts to influence the strategy, and then (in many cases) ran for cover when things went wrong. Partners like Maliki added their failures to a long list. This is a multi-sided, multi-national, bipartisan screw-up, for which we all bear some responsibility, and the task now is to figure out what to do next: what a viable strategy might look like.

Clearly, while we need a unified strategy (not just a string of “overseas contingency operations”), no country can structure its entire defence around this one issue. Preventing another 9/11 – as the past fourteen years show – is too narrow an organising principle for a national security strategy. But slogans like “don’t do stupid shit” or “leading from behind” are equally inadequate, as recent disasters prove.

Any coherent counterterrorism strategy must start by defining the threat – to paraphrase the military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz, by understanding the nature of the conflict in which we’re engaged, and neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something it’s not.

STATE OF FEAR

What ISIS is, and what it is not

ISIS has become the subject of intense debate. Is it a “death cult” defined by extreme barbarity and a seventh-century view of Islam? Is it the successor to al-Qaeda, a media-savvy transnational terrorist movement propagating a new-and-improved “Jihad 2.0”? Is it a confederation of groups opposed to the Iraqi government, with primarily regional goals? Is it one side in a Sunni–Shi’a version of Europe’s ghastly Thirty Years’ War?

Over time, I’ve come to believe that ISIS is more than any of these things. In my view, ISIS is fundamentally a
state-building enterprise
. Simply put, the Islamic State is, or is on the verge of becoming, what it claims to be: a state. I know this assertion is controversial, given that international leaders have been eager to deny ISIS the legitimacy of statehood. I understand the political logic – or, if you prefer, the propaganda value – of that standpoint. But consider the definition of a state in international relations, which is generally agreed to require the fulfilment of four criteria: (1) a state must control a territory, (2) that territory must be inhabited by a fixed population, (3) that population must owe allegiance to a government, and (4) that government must be capable of entering into relations with other states.

As of mid-2015, the Islamic State already meets, or is well on the way to meeting, all these criteria. It controls a territory that includes several major cities and covers a third each of Iraq and Syria, giving it an area significantly larger than Israel or Lebanon. This territory’s resident population is roughly 4.6 million – a higher head-count than New Zealand, Kuwait or Qatar, and almost as high as Norway, Denmark, Singapore or Finland. This territory and population is administered by a government that includes not only military forces, but also civic officials responsible for public utilities, hospitals, taxation, construction and food production, a judiciary that tries cases according to a consistent legal code, and an intelligence and police service. It issues birth certificates, marriage licenses – even parking tickets – levies taxes, and undertakes public works. (We might quibble over how
effective
this government is, or squirm at its brutality, but that’s irrelevant – it’s the existence, not the character, of government that meets this requirement under international law; otherwise places like North Korea wouldn’t count as states.)

Clearly, also, the Islamic State is capable of entering into relations with other states: it exports oil through Turkey, sells antiquities on the international market, has been accused of receiving state funding from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, employs an official spokesperson, and issues communiqués and proclamations. True enough, it maintains no formal embassies and isn’t recognised by other states, but the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (to which the United States is a signatory, and which is one of several sources for the criteria I just listed) explicitly notes that the “existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states.”

If ISIS is a state, then what kind of state is it? Pretty clearly, it’s a revolutionary totalitarian state, which seeks to expand by military conquest, refuses to recognise the legitimacy of other states (specifically, those defined by the Sykes–Picot Agreement that created the modern Middle East, or Iran or Israel) and wants to redraw the map of the Middle East and North Africa. It’s a state that claims extraterritorial jurisdiction (under the caliphate) over Muslims, wherever they may be, and propagates a totalitarian ideology based on a specific interpretation of Islam. It seeks overseas dependencies (the
wilayat
or provinces in Sinai, Khorasan, Libya, Sana’a and Algeria) and maintains an international underground that supplies volunteers and furthers its interests. It’s a state that sees itself in a world-historic struggle against Shi’a Islam and the West, and expects an apocalyptic showdown from which it will emerge victorious. Substitute the Comintern for the global underground, revolutionary Bolshevism for Islam, fraternal parties for the
wilayat
and the proletariat for the
ummah
, and we might be talking about revolutionary Russia circa 1923. My point is not that ISIS equates to communism, just that we’ve seen this movie before.

As a state, ISIS is also less vulnerable to disruption by the killing or capturing of its senior leaders. By late April 2015 there were claims – of varying credibility – that senior ISIS leaders had been killed or seriously injured. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was alleged to be wounded, paralysed or even dead as a result of a coalition airstrike, while Douri was reported killed by an Iranian-backed Shi’a militia. Even if both these claims prove true, because of its extensive command-and-control structure, the size of its Ba’athist and former AQI cadres, its diversified administration and leadership team, and its state-like structures at every level from central institutions to local branch offices, ISIS resiliency is likely to prove far greater than that of a loose terrorist network – precisely because it is structured like a state.

ISIS also fights like a state. As of mid-2015, even taking into account its losses in Iraq, ISIS fields more than 25,000 fighters, including a hard core of ex-Ba’athist professionals and AQI veterans. It has a hierarchical unit organisation and rank structure, populated by former regular officers of Saddam’s military. It fields tanks, heavy artillery, mortars and armoured vehicles by the dozen, reconnaissance units mounted in technicals that operate more like conventional light cavalry than guerrillas, internal security forces and infantry units of various levels of quality. It runs propaganda, intelligence and cyber-warfare activities, a recruiting network and training camps. There’s documentary evidence that professional soldiers, not terrorist amateurs, designed this structure. ISIS is now attempting to hold and defend cities using conventional urban tactics, seeking to control lines of communication, and trying to govern the area under its control and extract resources for its war effort. These resources are considerable, and include oilfields, refineries, industrial and agricultural facilities, access to strategically located water supplies, and millions of dollars a day in revenue.

But ISIS also embodies a set of potentially fatal contradictions. The first is the Ba’athist influence. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi owes his ascendancy to his Ba’athist prison-mates at Camp Bucca, to Haji Bakr’s elimination of his rivals, and to the prowess of former regime officers dotted throughout the ISIS military structure. After ISIS captured Mosul and Tikrit in 2014, it initially appointed two Ba’athist generals – Azhar al-Obeidi and Ahmed Abdul Rashid – as governors of these cities, but several senior Ba’athists within ISIS were killed in an air strike in October 2014, others have since been killed in battle, and there are rumours of a split between Ba’athist and jihadist factions. If indeed Baghdadi has been killed or seriously wounded, this split is likely to worsen significantly. Either way, the former regime officers – the majority of whom, in my experience, remain secular (though willing to use Islam to manipulate and motivate others) and interested solely in regaining power – create a rift at the heart of ISIS that could tear it apart.

A second contradiction is found in the divergent interests of those within the loose and shifting confederation of ISIS allies. In Iraq, this includes Douri’s network (which, even if reports of Douri’s death prove true, remains strong and widespread), along with tribal self-defence forces, a Sufi militia and former insurgent groups like Ansar al-Islam and Jaish al-Mujahideen. The fact that such a diverse coalition is fighting the Iraqi government indicates just how irretrievably Baghdad has lost the confidence of Iraq’s Sunnis. But it also makes it hard for the Islamic State to control its territory – each faction has different, potentially incompatible long-term goals. Some support a broader caliphate, others want to restore Sunni control over a unified Iraq, others again want a Sunni-controlled autonomous area within Iraq (on the pattern of Kurdistan), while still others just want Iranian-backed militias and the Shi’a-supremacist government off their backs.

A third contradiction lies in the differing goals of the primarily Iraqi leadership group of ISIS – which, I’m arguing, is fundamentally state-like and focused on controlling territory in Iraq and Syria and remaking the Middle East – and its international network. Radicalised individuals in Western democracies, or members of the overseas
wilayat
, emphasise the world-revolutionary nature of the Islamic State and are influenced by Baghdadi’s declaration of the caliphate in July 2014, which many see as creating a religious obligation to support ISIS. They couldn’t be less excited about restoring an Islamised version of Saddam’s Iraq. A showdown between jihadists and Ba’athists in the Islamic State would disillusion this global network – and should the jihadists lose, the ISIS Internationale may peel away.

Stepped-up military action by the international community, far from bonding jihadists and Ba’athists together against a common enemy, is likely to drive them apart – since coalition bombing began in August 2014 we’ve already seen increasing conflict among factions as their differing goals come to the fore. In this sense, the effect of international action is dramatically different from that of local action – whether by Iranian forces, Shi’a militias or Assad’s death squads. Whereas local sectarian adversaries tend to force factions to coalesce (a pattern seen throughout the conflict since 2003), international intervention tends to force them apart, opening fissures that may create opportunities both to destroy irreconcilables like ISIS and to forge peace settlements with reconcilable groups, such as tribal fighters or Sunni nationalists.

It’s also worth mentioning that the choice here is not between stepped-up Western intervention and
no
intervention – it’s between intervention led by the international community and conducted in accordance with international norms, or intervention led by an aggressively expansionist Iran and carried out on the ground by Assad’s
shabiha
and Iraqi sectarian militias, which in turn would draw an armed response from countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel.

Again, we’ve seen this before – in mentioning the Soviets I chose 1923 advisedly, since that was the last year that the USSR pursued a Trotskyist line on worldwide communist revolution. Once Stalin succeeded Lenin in 1924, recognised that the revolutions outside Russia had failed and adopted “socialism in one country,” Moscow’s relationship with the Comintern shifted fundamentally. The Soviet Union became a member (albeit a highly
disruptive
member) of the state system. Something comparable happened to revolutionary Iran in the 1980s, and a similar transformation might lie ahead for ISIS.