An F/A-18 Super Hornet launches from the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson as part of US operations in Iraq and Syria. © United States Navy
From the point of view of most inhabitants of western countries, the activities of Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, and its franchises (self-appointed or otherwise) in other countries, are barbaric. Beheadings, killing homosexuals by throwing them off rooftops, raping Yazidi women, passing child “brides” from one man to another for a price, are disgusting crimes. Nothing excuses them; but several things explain them.
One is that such behaviour is par for the historical course. For most of history in most parts of the world, squalid brutality was the norm in situations of conflict. It arose from contempt for enemies and the weak, the unbridled power that comes with conquest, and the expedient of terrorising captured populations and unnerving opponents by making them afraid of capture.
Another and more immediate reason is an aim that IS’s leadership is alleged to have set itself. Although their use of social media, management of finances, and profitable relationship to the arms trade appear to suggest that they are not complete fools, the aim suggests otherwise. It is to provoke the west and especially the United States into returning to boots-on-the-ground combat in the Middle East, offering IS the opportunity to realise a prophecy in the
hadith(the words of the Prophet Mohammad) that there will be a final conquest of the infidel at Dabiq, aided by a returned Mahdi (the messiah) and an Islamised Jesus.
IS is, in other words, issuing an invitation to the US and its allies to fight it in conventional military style, army to army on the battlefield. Is IS thereby making a very big mistake? And would the US and its allies make an opposite mistake if it did not accept the invitation? Only think: a ragged insurgency can keep a mighty military machine of the conventional type bogged down and victoryless for many years: witness Afghanistan and before it Vietnam. The unpleasant and expensive experience of dealing with little bands of fighters capable of melting into their own home turf at whim has made the US draw in its horns.
But IS is not offering itself as a nagging insurgency: it has set itself up as a “state” with a defined territorial location, and thinks it can win in circumstances equivalent to the two US-led invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003 which, one recalls, resulted within mere weeks in the overwhelming defeat of the Iraqi armies. IS thinks it can win in the same circumstances because it (says it) believes that the Mahdi and Jesus will appear and fight on its side. As neither of these gentlemen is ever likely to appear, the probabilities are that IS would meet the same fate, and probably faster, that befell Saddam Hussein’s military.
There is a lot to be said for the idea of destroying IS in the territory it occupies. Its diaspora of franchises, as was the case with al Qaeda, might continue to be an intermittently dangerous irritant afterwards, which means that the war on its finances and communications would need to be maintained—this anyway being indispensable to achieving final victory over it. But by severing IS’s tap-root on the borders of Iraq, Syria and Turkey a huge amount would be done in depriving the franchises of support.
In the event that the US and its allies choose not to return in force to the Middle East, one practical option and one questionable alternative remain. The practical option is to increase special operations and air attacks, and to arm the Kurds properly. It is unconscionable that the US has not given them the right tools to do the job they are so valiantly doing on everyone else’s behalf.
The questionable alternative is to wait for two of the big regional players—Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose war-by-proxy with each other has been fuelling the internecine strife of the region for many years—to decide to take stronger action in their respective ways, and even perhaps in concert.
For Iran, IS’s brutal war on Shias is a casus belli in its own right. For Saudi, from where much wealth has siphoned itself into various terrorist causes under varying degrees of official blindness and complicity, IS has become a threat too: one Saudi commented, “Where did
Daesh [IS] come from? It’s our own product returned to us.” An Iran-Saudi axis against IS would be a strange bed-fellowing, but if the terror group progresses, it might be forced on them.
It might even be necessary for anti-IS coalitions in the region to get under the covers with an even more uncongenial bedfellow: the Bashar al-Assad regime, on the principle of “my enemy’s enemy”—for the time being at least. There might not be a lot to choose between Assad and IS, but who would pick the latter if forced to choose?
