How much does Isis stand to gain from the collapse of the US-Kurdish coalition it has been fighting for the last five years? The turmoil will be all the greater because of Trump’s bizarre decision to reverse course and increase the number of US troops in the oil fields of eastern Syria. All this adds up to the sort of confusion that Isis has traditionally taken advantage of. Will it similarly be able to benefit from the situation in Iraq, as a disintegrating government grapples with an incipient uprising among its own Shia supporters? It may be that Isis no longer has the strength to exploit the division among its enemies. Movements that combine ideological fanaticism with military expertise can be lethally effective in warfare, but they need victories to validate the justness of their cause. Such victories now seem far off, but the removal of al-Baghdadi may make it easier for Isis to adapt to circumstances that are moving in its favour.
Could Isis Have Won? Could It Return?
11 November 2019
Could Isis have won the war in Iraq and Syria? Was it always inevitable that the reborn caliphate declared in 2014 after the capture of Mosul would be eliminated as a territorial entity less than five years later? These are important questions that are seldom asked because many observers condemn Isis as an unmitigated evil and fail to analyse its strengths and weaknesses. But these are important if we are to understand the chances of Isis resurrecting itself in Syria and Iraq or re-emerging under a different name with ostensibly different objectives. It is worth asking: what were the religious, military, political, social, and economic ingredients that went into creating and sustaining this extraordinary militarised cult that for a considerable amount of time controlled a state that extended from the outskirts of Baghdad to the hills overlooking the Mediterranean.
In retrospect, military defeats and victories acquire a false sense of inevitability about them, whether we are looking at the German defeat of France in 1940 or the claimed elimination of the last vestiges of Isis in 2019. Historians study long-term trends, but contemporary witnesses are more aware of the degree to which good or bad decisions determined the outcome of a conflict and that the result might have gone the other way. For instance, what would have happened if Isis had not attacked the Kurds, who would have been happy to stay neutral in both Iraq and Syria in the second half of 2014? This diverted Isis from its spectacularly successful assault on central government forces in both countries and precipitated the devastating intervention of US airpower. If the Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had not split the jihadi movement in Syria in 2013 by seeking to absorb his former proxy, the al-Nusra Front, back into the mother organisation, then Isis would have been in a much stronger position to fight a long war. Probably its very fanaticism—and its belief that it had a monopoly of divine support—prevented it showing greater political adroitness, but we cannot be sure.
As surviving Isis fighters staggered out of the ruins of their last stronghold at Baghuz on the Euphrates River on 23 March 2019, it was difficult to recapture the sense of dread that they had spread at the height of their success. I was in Baghdad in June 2014 when their columns of vehicles packed with gunmen were sweeping south as the regular Iraqi army divisions broke into fragments and fled before them. Some Iraqis, with a sense of history, compared the onslaught to that of the Mongol horsemen who captured and sacked Baghdad in 1258. Official spokesmen on television would stay silent or announce fictitious victories, so I would call policemen in towns in the path of Isis and ask what was happening. Often the calls revealed that it was advancing with frightening speed against crumbling or non-existent opposition. I remember thinking that reporters in Paris in May and June 1940 must have tracked the advance of German panzer divisions towards Paris with similar trepidation.
I learned that Isis had captured without resistance Saddam Hussein’s home city of Tikrit and had occupied the town of Baiji next to Iraq’s biggest oil refinery. Their fighters were going house-to-house examining identity cards and, to the dismay of inhabitants, taking away the IDs of unmarried women to be photocopied, presumably as prospective brides. I did not know at that stage the full details of what became known as the Camp Speicher massacre that Isis had carried out, slaughtering 1,700 Shia air force recruits outside Tikrit. Later I saw a horrible video of an executioner shooting the terrified young men in the head with a pistol on a landing stage by the Tigris, so their bodies fell into the water. On a bluff overlooking the river, the jihadis had dumped the bodies into pits amid old half-ruined palaces of Saddam Hussein.
Isis might have made a quick dash for Baghdad in a bid to create a mass panic among the capital’s Shia majority. There were rumours that the Sunni minority inside the city would rise up in coordination with Isis units attacking from the outside. I suspected that talk of Isis “sleeper cells” was exaggerated and that it was outrunning its military resources. Moreover, the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani had called on 13 June for a mass levy of all Iraqis to support what was left of the Iraqi armed forces. There were negative signs as well: the Iraqi government seemed paralysed by its surprise defeat in Mosul and state TV was broadcasting undiluted propaganda, though viewers noticed that there were no pictures of the morale-boosting but non-existent successes. Isis might not be able to seize Baghdad, but that did not mean they would not try. Hotels in Jordan were reported to be full of Iraqi MPs and ministers. Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister, told me to look closely at the entrances to other ministries: if there were new sandbags visible, as was the case with his own ministry, that meant that the minister was still there. But, if the sandbags were old and torn and had not been renewed, then the probability was that the minister had already sought safety elsewhere.
The moment of opportunity for Isis lasted for about two months in the summer of 2014, when they were carrying all before them in both Iraq and Syria. They had captured the largest oil and gas fields in Syria and inflicted a string of defeats on the Syrian army. Their atrocities, well publicised on social media, created real terror among their opponents. Then on 6 August, they made a strategic change of direction, the motives for which are still one of the great mysteries of the war: they shifted the weight of their attack away from the Iraqi armies and invaded the territory held by the Kurdistan Regional Government, which would have been happy to stay on the by-lines and exploit the weakness of the central government to its own advantage. Two days later, President Barack Obama ordered US jets to start “targeted air strikes” on Isis artillery units.
The following month Isis launched a full-scale assault on the Kurdish city of Kobani and, in ferocious fighting in September and October, captured most of it. But the Syrian Kurds fought hard and the US launched air strikes that reduced Isis-held Kobani to rubble and may have killed as many as 2,000 Isis fighters during the four-month siege. It was the movement’s first failure and it persuaded the White House and the Pentagon that in the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units, they had at last found an effective ally on the ground in Syria. The US-Kurdish alliance forged in 2014 lasted for five years until the last strongholds of Isis were over-run when it was ruthlessly discarded by Donald Trump, who gave the green light to a Turkish invasion.
Isis military capacity always exceeded its political ability. Its assault on the Kurds may have been encouraged by Turkey, which was allowing volunteers and supplies to move freely