"The jihadists may have gone too far"

[applegrove]

The jihadists may have gone too far

at the Economist

http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21593462-baghdad-beirut-growing-backlash-against-most-extreme

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IN A region of opaque politics and oddly named actors, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) lives up to its title. The group that started as an al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq has prospered there since the Americans left in 2011, subduing much of the rural, Sunni-dominated north and pursuing an aggressive terror campaign against Shias further south. ISIS expanded into Syria in April last year; al-Sham denotes a Greater Syria encompassing—among swathes of what was the fertile crescent—Lebanon, Palestine and even Jordan. Better armed and financed, it has encroached steadily into areas freed from government control by other rebel groups, enforcing harsh, state-like authority along the Euphrates valley and across much of the north. But the group’s rapid rise may now be over.

Today ISIS’s fighters, who include as many as 7,000 would-be jihadists from across the globe, face battles on three fronts. In Syria a wave of disgruntlement with the group turned into a tsunami after December 31st when its men returned the torture-marked corpse of a doctor-cum-commander with Ahrar al-Sham, a Salafist rebel group which had hitherto been an ally. A final provocation came when ISIS abducted five employees of Médecins Sans Frontières, a French-founded charity that is one of the few aid organisations still willing to work inside Syria.

Since then, rebels of all stripes, including al-Qaeda’s slightly milder Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, other Islamist brigades and moderate Western-backed groups known as the Free Syrian Army, have joined forces, rapidly sweeping ISIS from strongholds across a swathe of northern Syria. In Raqqa, the biggest town wholly controlled by the opposition, most recently by ISIS, its fighters are now said to be holding out in a single building. The group is also said to have lost all but one of the border crossings to Turkey it once held, as well as its headquarters in the rebel-held half of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city.

ISIS is also under fire in neighbouring Iraq. Exploiting the simmering resentment among minority Sunnis in the country’s north and west against the Shia-dominated Iraqi government in Baghdad, ISIS on January 3rd seized parts of Falluja and Ramadi, the main cities of Anbar province, which abuts Syria (see our map). But this bold move may have played into the hands of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki.




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