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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIsis consolidates
August 2014
Patrick Cockburn
As the attention of the world focused on Ukraine and Gaza, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) captured a third of Syria in addition to the quarter of Iraq it had seized in June. The frontiers of the new Caliphate declared by Isis on 29 June are expanding by the day and now cover an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people, a population larger than that of Denmark, Finland or Ireland. In a few weeks of fighting in Syria Isis has established itself as the dominant force in the Syrian opposition, routing the official al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, in the oil-rich province of Deir Ezzor and executing its local commander as he tried to flee. In northern Syria some five thousand Isis fighters are using tanks and artillery captured from the Iraqi army in Mosul to besiege half a million Kurds in their enclave at Kobani on the Turkish border. In central Syria, near Palmyra, Isis fought the Syrian army as it overran the al-Shaer gasfield, one of the largest in the country, in a surprise assault that left an estimated three hundred soldiers and civilians dead. Repeated government counter-attacks finally retook the gasfield but Isis still controls most of Syrias oil and gas production. The Caliphate may be poor and isolated but its oil wells and control of crucial roads provide a steady income in addition to the plunder of war.
The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet this explosive transformation has created surprisingly little alarm internationally or even among those in Iraq and Syria not yet under the rule of Isis. Politicians and diplomats tend to treat Isis as if it is a Bedouin raiding party that appears dramatically from the desert, wins spectacular victories and then retreats to its strongholds leaving the status quo little changed. Such a scenario is conceivable but is getting less and less likely as Isis consolidates its hold on its new conquests in an area that may soon stretch from Iran to the Mediterranean.
The very speed and unexpectedness of its rise make it easy for Western and regional leaders to hope that the fall of Isis and the implosion of the Caliphate might be equally sudden and swift. But all the evidence is that this is wishful thinking and the trend is in the other direction, with the opponents of Isis becoming weaker and less capable of resistance: in Iraq the army shows no signs of recovering from its earlier defeats and has failed to launch a single successful counter-attack; in Syria the other opposition groups, including the battle-hardened fighters of al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, are demoralised and disintegrating as they are squeezed between Isis and the Assad government. Karen Koning Abuzayd, a member of the UNs Commission of Inquiry in Syria, says that more and more Syrian rebels are defecting to Isis: They see its better, these guys are strong, these guys are winning battles, they were taking territory, they have money, they can train us. This is bad news for the government, which barely held off an assault in 2012 and 2013 by rebels less well trained, organised and armed than Isis; it will have real difficulties stopping the forces of the Caliphate advancing west.
In Baghdad there was shock and terror on 10 June at the fall of Mosul and as people realised that trucks packed with Isis gunmen were only an hours drive away. But instead of assaulting Baghdad, Isis took most of Anbar, the vast Sunni province that sprawls across western Iraq on either side of the Euphrates. In Baghdad, with its mostly Shia population of seven million, people know what to expect if the murderously anti-Shia Isis forces capture the city, but they take heart from the fact that the calamity has not happened yet. We were frightened by the military disaster at first but we Baghdadis have got used to crises over the last 35 years, one woman said. Even with Isis at the gates, Iraqi politicians have gone on playing political games as they move ponderously towards replacing the discredited prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n16/patrick-cockburn/isis-consolidates
Old and In the Way
(37,540 posts)You got the guy that tried to kill your
daddy....was it worth killing Iraq and creating the opportunity for Islamic fundementalism to fill the void?
napkinz
(17,199 posts)Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)Igel
(35,282 posts)It will not survive. Like other such phenomena in the last couple hundred years it will have to metamorphose.
This may happen when the leader dies and there's infighting and no clear replacement. Then things might get messy briefly before some order is established. Perhaps the territory is divided up. It varies.
If a replacement leader is found, fine. They play kick the can *or* the state stops being what it was and becomes something more moderate.
Or the leader himself finds that for all his faith in the Salafist views they just don't work well enough. Then he has a choice: He moderates or turns the place over to somebody more moderate; or the place fractures into pieces because for all the zeal of his military and religious cadres the centrifugal tendencies of a displeased population is just too much.
The problem is that everybody's running around saying "I have to solve this, and it has to be solved by the end of next month." "Short-term thinking" is getting to be less and less accurate. "Immediate term thinking" is more like it. Short-term planning used to be a year or two, and everybody's so busy arguing and posturing that they have no predictive capacity and must react immediately. (It's like with Congress and the last few budget bills and debt ceiling increases. "We have an emergency!"--one that they designed and knew about for many months and yet did nothing about ... until they could call it an emergency.)
The only real danger is that the IS grows and engulfs more states that aren't quite so homogeneous. Lebanon would be messy. Turkey, untenable. Israel would put up a fight. In fact if Jordan's attacked, Israel might well assist in Jordan (which would be clever and possibly lead to a possible bit of good will towards Israel but would inevitably lead some Arab loons to think that Israel must have been behind ISIS all along). It's very unclear that they're going to fret about Turkey, though. Lebanon and Jordan are at risk.
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)make the situation much worse.
fujiyama
(15,185 posts)look straight out of Vietnam. Their fear and the terror they face is palpable. And just like Vietnam was and will always be known as Johnson's war, those images should be Bush's legacy - though I have a fear the media will try to whitewash it.
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)Those images you speak of are just raw..horrible.