Thursday, August 6, 2015

No, We’re Not Winning the War on ISIS

 Contentions

No, We’re Not Winning the War on ISIS


It’s almost exactly a year ago that the American military campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria began. On August 8, 2014, American warplanes began bombing ISIS positions in Iraq, a campaign that soon expanded to Syria as well.

How’s it going? Optimists can take heart from the finding of one research organization that over the past year ISIS has lost 9.4% of its territory, mainly in northern Syria (where the Kurds have been on the offensive) and around Tikrit, Iraq (where the offensive was led by Iranian-backed militias supported by Iraqi security forces). True, but that ignores the fact that ISIS continues to control a sprawling pseudo-state stretching from the vicinity of Homs and Aleppo in Syria to Mosul and Ramadi in Iraq.

Those who assert that progress is being made can also take heart from Undersecretary of State Richard Stengel’s claim that the U.S. is actually winning the media war against ISIS, which seems to rest largely on the proposition that things could be a lot worse than they actually are. “Analysts believe that about 500 to 2,000 dedicated ISIL fanboys (call them Hashtag Jihadis) are stirring up the traffic on social media and propagating most of the links…,” Stengel wrote in the Washington Post.

“The roughly 20,000 foreign fighters it has recruited is about .001 percent of the Muslim population — that’s one one-thousandth of 1 percent.” True, but as the 9/11 attack showed, it doesn’t take a lot of individuals to wreak havoc — on that day, 19 men pulled off the most destructive terrorist attack in history.

In any case, the optimists’ case is quickly deflated by articles such as this one in the New York Times reporting on an internal debate among American intelligence and security officials over which is the bigger threat — al-Qaeda or ISIS:
The split reflects a rising concern that the Islamic State poses a more immediate danger because of its unprecedented social media campaign, using sophisticated online messaging to inspire followers to launch attacks across the United States.
Many intelligence and counterterrorism officials warn, however, that Qaeda operatives in Yemen and Syria are capitalizing on the turmoil in those countries to plot much larger “mass-casualty” attacks, including bringing down airliners carrying hundreds of passengers.
Further down in the article, there is an alarming leak which suggests that ISIS is hardly growing weaker:
American analysts say the Islamic State is replacing its combatants in Iraq and Syria as fast as the United States and its allies are killing them there, and the group still maintains as many as 31,000 fighters. It remains well funded — earning close to $1 billion a year in oil revenues and taxes, according to Treasury Department estimates — and has expanded to other countries, including Libya, Afghanistan and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.
And now there is every reason to believe that, with Mullah Omar’s death, ISIS will actually be able to expand its inroads into Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This doesn’t sound like a group on the road to being “degraded” and “destroyed,” as President Obama promised a year ago. From my vantage point, it looks as if ISIS has been weathering the American assault nicely, and even gaining points with its followers for thriving under the bombs of the world’s sole superpower.

Is there hope that this situation will change anytime soon? Not really. The most promising recent development has been the U.S.-Turkish agreement to support an “ISIS-free zone” in northern Syria. But with the Turks insisting that it will not be defended by Kurds, it’s hard to know who will actually do the fighting on the ground — the 60 fighters the Pentagon has trained, a number of whom have already been killed or kidnapped? And what about Iraq — who will fight ISIS designs there? The 3,400 U.S. personnel on the ground have not produced a change in the on-the-ground situation, which continues to be a stalemate between ISIS, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Iranian-backed militias, with the Iraqi security forces relegated to an increasingly marginal role. In fact, as Jonathan Spyer reports from Iraq, the Iranian takeover of that country — at least the parts not controlled by the Kurds or ISIS – is well advanced.

President Obama may be indifferent to the Iranian advance, which will get a turbo-charge from the nuclear deal, but it makes it difficult to make any progress against ISIS when the Sunnis of both Iraq and Syria are convinced that the alternative to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State “caliph,” is Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, who is about to be taken off international sanctions lists.

In sum, it is hard to see how anyone who is not a paid White House operative could possibly suggest that the war against ISIS is having much success, much less the broader war on terrorism, which is being lost not only to ISIS but also to al-Qaeda and to Shiite terrorist groups organized by (our new partner) Iran.

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