|
|
Follow the Middle East Forum
|
|
|
Eclipse of the
Caliphate
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the first of your friends to like this.
All photos property of Jonathan Spyer.
|
Islamic
State territorial gains (green) and losses (red) in 2015.
|
Erbil, Iraq — Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, in the last days of
2015 is a place that appears to have risen from a near-death experience.
In the summer of 2014, the fighters of the Islamic State (IS) got to
within 45 kilometers of this city. Around 30 percent of the inhabitants
left. The foreign companies that had turned Erbil into a boom town
hurriedly pulled out.
In their place, throngs of refugees filled all the available empty
spaces. US air power stopped the advance of the jihadis, but the Iraqi
Kurds were left bruised and shaken.
I visited the city at that time. It was a place in a state of shock.
Since the 1990s, the Kurds of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in
the north of strife-torn Iraq had become accustomed to viewing themselves
as a haven of sanity and industry in the heart of the Middle East. In the
summer of 2014, the Iraqi Kurds discovered just how fragile all that was.
And just how easily the most frenzied of the region's furies could force
their way in.
A year on, they have recovered their composure. The refugees are still
here, but they are now in tent encampments or housing, rather than on the
streets and in disused buildings. The foreigners have begun to return. The
restaurants are full on weekday evenings. The Islamic State has been driven
back to the western side of the Tigris, all along the plain between Erbil
and Mosul.
Now it is the Kurds and their allies who are outside the main cities of
IS, rather than the other way round. Yet, Erbil has not become immune. An
IS suicide bomber hit the US Consulate on April 17 – a cocky demonstration
on its part that even the most security-saturated parts of the city were
not immune to penetration.
|
Kamal
Kirkuki (left) and the author with a captured Islamic State flag, Kirkuk
area, December 2015.
|
I am here again to take a look at the ground war against IS in Iraq and
Syria, a year after the jihadis reached their furthest point of advance.
The year 2015 was not an especially good one for the Islamic State. Its
slogan, famously, is "baqiya wa-tatamaddad" – remaining
and expanding. As of now, the first of these objectives remains firmly in
place, the second far less so. With the Kurdish Pesh Merga outside Mosul,
and further south the Iraqi Golden Division inside Ramadi City, and Tikrit,
Baiji and Sinjar lost in the course of the year. 2015 was a year of slow
contraction for IS in Iraq.
In Syria, too, IS has lost ground. Here, the unlikely partnering of US
air power with a local franchise of the Kurdish PKK, the militant Kurdistan
Workers' Party, is mainly responsible for the advances. In Syria, too, it
was US air power that was the crucial addition to the fight that halted and
reversed the headlong advance of the jihadis.
The initiative in northern Iraq is
now in the hands of the Kurds.
|
In both the Iraqi and, even more, the Syrian cases, the crucial
contribution of air power was to nullify the advantage enjoyed by the
jihadis because of their possession of heavy weapons. Neither the Pesh
Merga, the KRG's military force, nor the lightly armed YPG People's
Protection Units in Syria had any real response to the up to date
artillery, armored vehicles and Humvees – looted from the garrison at Mosul
– that the jihadis could put into action.
US air power served to even the playing field. The courage and tenacity
of the Kurdish fighters could then come into play. It is a formula that has
proved tentatively successful. It halted the jihadis and is now very slowly
pushing them back.
Interviews with commanders and fighters of the Pesh Merga, revealed a
growing confidence that the Islamic State had passed its high point as a
semi-conventional military voice.
Captain Rebin Rozhbayane, a commander of the Pesh Merga special forces,
describes largely quiet frontlines in which the initiative is now in the
hands of the Kurds. "Mortars, sniping but no major attacks at the
moment," he tells me, as we meet in the lobby of a hotel in the
Christian section of Erbil.
Rozhbayane, a 10-year veteran of the Pesh Merga, commands a rapid
reaction force of 80 fighters on the Gwer front.
IS is no longer seeking the initiative, the captain notes. Rather, they
now appear content to wait. It is the Kurds who are moving forward.
"Mosul is the next target," he asserts. Once Iraq's
second-largest city with a mainly Arab population, Mosul is likely to prove
a tougher target. IS's ability to proclaim itself a "state or caliphate"
rather than simply a jihadi fiefdom in Iraq largely rests on its holding
Mosul. The taking of this city in August 2014 was the key moment in the
Islamic State's advance and the group will defend it with all means
available.
This is not the case, however, with the generality of its holdings. IS
now needs to conserve resources.
Rozhbayane notes that the latest major victory of the Kurds, in Sinjar
city, was achieved against relatively minor resistance. The desperate
determination with which IS pressed its offensive in Kobani at the end of
2014 against the YPG and US air power cost it heavily. Some 2,000 jihadi
fighters are thought to have died in the ruins of that Syrian Kurdish city.
But by the end of January, IS was forced to retreat. The lesson the jihadis
learned from this is that unless a point absolutely must be held, it is
better to abandon it than to risk another costly defeat like Kobani.
Even in Ramadi, which IS clearly wanted to keep, a force of only about
1000 jihadis was left to face the assault of 10,000 Iraqi government
troops, backed by US aircraft.
The sense that IS is returning to
focused terror attacks as it retreats militarily was repeated to me many
times.
|
Kamal Kirkuki, former speaker of the KRG's parliament, a veteran of the
ruling Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and now a commander of the Pesh Merga
on the north-west Kirkuk front, tells me that "ISIS has declined and
is morally weak. They no longer have the force to attack us. "What
they can do," he adds, "is terror attacks." Kirkuki is
referring to specific events in the Kirkuk area. But the sense that IS may
be returning to focused terrorist attacks as its ability to expand
militarily evaporates was repeated to me many times during the course of my
time in Iraq and Syria.
The turn of the jihadis toward international terrorism – with the
downing of the Russian Metrojet Flight 9268 on October 31 and the
coordinated attacks in Paris on November 13 – are ominous signs of the
potency that a refocused IS could have.
A European volunteer with the Pesh Merga told me in Erbil that "we
need to fight IS here or we'll be fighting them in Europe in 10
years."
The rhetoric of this statement is impressive and there is a deeper truth
to it. However, it may well be that, tactically, the correlation is more
complex. The more IS loses ground in its "state," the more it may
turn its attention to terrorism against both near and far enemies to
maintain the sense of momentum on which it depends.
For the Iraqi Kurds, there is, of course, a larger political context to
all this. Kirkuki, who is known as one of the more nationalist of senior
KDP members, refers to Iraq as a "failed state" and advocates the
establishment of three states to replace it – "Kurdistan, Shia-stan
and Sunni-stan."
KRG President Massoud Barzani recently announced the recommencement of
preparations for a referendum on independence in the KRG area. Plans were
afoot before IS erupted across the border in the summer of 2014. Now that
the jihadis have been held and the immediate danger has passed, the notion is
returning to the agenda.
There are complications, however. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the
KDP's rivals, is close to Iran and would be likely to oppose a bid for
political separation. The West's position remains ambivalent.
But the very fact that independence has returned to the agenda is an
indication both of the perceived waning threat of IS and of the persistent,
structural problems facing Iraq, of which the Sunni jihadis are a
manifestation, rather than a cause.
Syria
|
Syrian
Kurds hope to unite their non-contiguous cantons along the Syrian-Turkish
border.
|
In Syria, the situation is even more complicated. The "border"
that separates northern Iraq from northern Syria is now administered by
Kurdish forces on both sides. The process of administration and passage at
the FishKhabur/Semalka crossing is orderly enough. A traveler passes
through one set of Kurdish officials, across the Tigris river in an old
metal barge, and then past a second bureaucratic process on the other side.
But the seeming tranquility belies a strained reality. The Kurds may
control an uninterrupted area of ground all the way from the Iraq-Iran
border to seven hours' drive into Syria. But the Iraqi Kurdish KDP and the
PKK-oriented Syrian Kurdish PYD remain implacable rivals.
In northeast Syria, though, the ambiguities go beyond the narrow Kurdish
context.
The last positions of the Assad regime still remain deep in the area of
Kurdish control, with tension between the sides never far from the surface.
The regime's presence has been eroded in recent years. Where once there
was an imposing government checkpoint at the entrance to Qamishli city, the
main urban center of "Rojava," the Syrian Kurdish domain, now
Assad's forces remain confined to a few clearly defined points of the city.
The regime soldiers look scruffy and exhausted, not so different from
the rebels. Every so often, one sees a well-fed mukhabarat (secret
service) type in a leather jacket moving about close to the regime
facilities. Caution is advised. The regime tries every so often to force
young Kurds into the ranks of its army. The Kurdish security forces resist.
Syrian Kurdistan is a much poorer, more provisional affair than the KRG.
In the KRG, a class of KDP-linked people has enriched itself enormously and
an atmosphere of consumerist normality prevails. IS put a dent in this in 2014,
but it has now been contained.
In Syrian Kurdistan, by contrast, there is still something of the
atmosphere of revolution, of scant resources and devotion. The YPG militia
has proven the most powerful irregular force in northern Syria apart from
IS itself. The partnering of US air power with Kurdish determination on the
ground has brought the YPG to within 30 kilometers of the
"capital" of the Islamic State – Raqqa City.
There is a central dilemma in this partnership, however. The PKK, the
evident "mother organization" of the PYD and YPG, remains on the
US and EU list of terrorist organizations. There appear to be no serious
efforts under way to amend this.
The result is that while YPG fighters are responsible for calling in US
airstrikes against IS targets, legal restrictions on supplying their
fighters mean that they operate in the most primitive conditions, almost
always without helmets and body armor, often without boots, without night
vision equipment and without anything approaching adequate medical
provisions.
|
The
former IS "Islamic Court" in al-Hawl.
|
In spite of all this, they are covering ground, and driving IS back.
In the town of al-Hawl, 40 kilometers east of Hasakeh city and liberated
in mid-November, I saw the swiftly rotting remains of the primitive
administration that IS had established in the town. The painted black signs
proclaiming the "Islamic court" in Hawl painted over with the
YPG's vivid red and the building broken and abandoned.
The next target is Shadadi, further south, Kemal Amuda, a YPG commander
tells me at a frontline position south of the city. The intention is to cut
Mosul off from Raqqa and split the Islamic State in two.
"We need better weapons systems," says Amuda. "Anti-tank
weapons, tanks, armored cars. Then we could take Raqqa in a month. Support
from the air isn't enough."
As of now, the US appears to be supporting a rebranding of the Kurdish
YPG that will allow the deepening of cooperation.
In October 2015, a new anti-IS coalition, called the Syrian Democratic
Forces (SDF), was announced. This force brings together the YPG with the
remains of non-jihadi rebel formations in northern Syria – Shams al Shamal,
Thuwar Raqqa and others, and with a militia of the Shammar tribe, the
so-called Jaysh al Sanadid (Army of the Brave).
It is a somewhat lopsided affair, however. The 40,000 strong YPG
accounts for around 90 percent of its strength. The Sanadid has about 5,000
fighters, the remaining rebel groups substantially fewer. The goal of the
SDF is clearly to enable the Kurds to avoid (or seek to avoid) accusations
of separatism, and the US to avoid accusations of favoring the Kurds.
There is a built in tenuousness to the political side of the alliance.
The American goal is to bring a force into the IS capital of Raqqa city,
and by so doing terminate any notion of the Islamic State as an actual
quasi-state entity.
The Syrian Kurds are more interested in uniting the Kurdish cantons
along the Syrian-Turkish border and thus completing their control of the
Syrian side of the border (a prospect that alarms and infuriates the
Turks). On December 26, the SDF completed the conquest of the Tishreen Dam.
This target could form part of a drive toward Raqqa (it removes from IS
the chance to rush forces from Aleppo province to the city). Or it could be
the commencement of a Kurdish push westward to begin the unification of the
cantons.
IS once sent waves of men across
open ground, preceded by 'suicide' cars; now it deploys small groups,
seeking to preserve manpower.
|
But while the politics remain deeply ambiguous, once again, the military
direction seems clear – IS is losing ground in northern Syria, slowly, but
surely.
A YPG commander at a frontline position describes to me the changing
tactics employed by the jihadis. Where once they sent waves of men across
open ground, preceded by "suicide cars," now they move in small
groups, cautiously, seeking to preserve manpower. "Their power is
derived from intimidation and imposing terror," suggests the
commander. "This has now gone. They are afraid of us and of the
international coalition."
It is important, of course, not to exaggerate the advances made against
IS. Both Raqqa and Mosul remain formidable targets, along with much
additional territory. But the direction of Western supported coalition
forces is clear – and it is forward.
Even if IS continues to be eroded, this will not answer the bigger
questions concerning the future arrangement of what was once Iraq and
Syria. The clashes of formidable regional powers – Saudi Arabia, Iran and
Turkey – and global ones – the US and Russia – will continue independently
of the fate of the jihadi entity.
|
Remains
of an IS fighter south of al-Hawl, northeastern Syria.
|
But in a region in which good news is scant, the survival of two very
different Kurdish projects in northern Iraq and northern Syria, and their
successful rallying in partnership with the West against perhaps the most
graphically murderous manifestation of political Islam in recent times is a
point of light.
In the desert south of Hawl, I came across what initially looked like a
small clump of mounds on the side of the road. On inspection, these were
the bodies of IS fighters torn apart in a coalition air strike during the
fighting a month earlier. The sightless eyes stared skyward. The Kurds had covered
the bodies lightly with sand before continuing south. These unrespected
dead were a silent indication of the current direction of the war.
As of now, the Islamic State is remaining – but retreating.
Jonathan Spyer is director of the
Rubin Center for Research in International Affairs and a fellow at the
Middle East Forum.
|
|
|
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment