Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (15 page)

ISIS troops pushed east out of Mosul towards the Kurdish capital of Irbil, some 60 miles (90 kilometres) away, driving tens of thousands of refugees from the non-Muslim religious minorities who lived on the Nineveh Plains (Assyrian Christians and Yazidis) ahead of them. They struck the Kurdish front line by surprise—the Kurds
thought their enemy was still busy further south—and very nearly broke through. Had they done so, they would have been in Irbil in a day. This came as a shock to Iraqis and especially to the Kurds themselves. It had long been believed that the Kurdish army, the Peshmerga, was the most reliable fighting force in the country, but this time considerable numbers of its soldiers were simply abandoning their posts and running away.

The problem was that the Peshmerga’s reputation was based on its performance in wars against Iraqi government forces in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. It had not actually fought anybody for twenty-three years, and rapid urbanization in Kurdistan meant that its new recruits were mostly not tough mountain boys but city kids. Moreover, the Kurdish troops were stretched thinly along a front line of 600 miles (1000 kilometres) between ISIS and KRG-controlled territory, and it was not a full-service army with lots of tanks, artillery and the like. The equipment it did have was mostly very old and certainly not comparable to what ISIS had rearmed itself with after capturing Mosul. So ISIS managed to drive a deep bulge into the front and frighten everybody in Irbil half to death—but in the end it did not break through. A large part of the reason is because it was stopped by the first American air strikes of the new war.

President Obama had repeatedly said he would not “allow the United States to be dragged into another war in Iraq” as ISIS swept across western and northwestern Iraq in June 2014. In mid-July he modified this to a pledge that
U.S. military support for Iraq would come only when a new, inclusive government (that is, one not led by Nouri al Maliki) was formed in Baghdad, but it was left unclear whether this military support might ultimately include air strikes or even “boots on the ground.” Obama saw getting U.S. troops out of two Middle Eastern wars as one of the most important achievements of his administration, and sending them back was the last thing he wanted to do. But the apparently imminent collapse of the Kurdish defences forced his hand, and on August 8, four F-18 jets from a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Gulf carried out the first U.S. air strikes of the new war, dropping 500-pound laser-guided bombs on ISIS mobile artillery that was firing in support of advancing ISIS forces only half an hour’s drive from Irbil. (The planes were coming from a distant aircraft carrier because Turkey had not given permission for its American ally to use the far more convenient airbase at Incirlik for air strikes in Iraq.)

Further strikes followed that same night, and by the end of the month there had been over a hundred American air attacks on ISIS targets in Iraq. There is no doubt that these air strikes were a major morale boost for the Peshmerga, but it’s possible that the Kurds could have stopped the ISIS offensive even without American help. They fought well after they got over their surprise, even taking some lost territory back in counter-attacks. In the end the ISIS offensive was stopped and the Kurdish front line was stabilized, although it was much closer to Irbil
(30 miles/45 kilometres) than before, and the important Mosul Dam had fallen into ISIS hands.

What was gradually becoming clearer in this period were the strengths and limitations of ISIS as a military force. Its troops were formidable in the attack thanks to their high motivation and the fact that by now they had considerably more combat experience than most of the forces they fought, but the same tactics that could be used against any other attacker worked against ISIS too. Nor did the ISIS fighters all choose to die where they stood when they were losing; as any other sensible soldiers would do, they retreated. Fighting ISIS is not “a new kind of war.” It’s just war, that’s all.

CHAPTER 8

IN SEARCH OF A STRATEGY

B
y the end of August 2014, ISIS’s phase of explosive expansion was over, and it now needed to stabilize its control over most of the Sunni-majority regions in Iraq. (For purposes of clarity I will continue to refer to the fighting forces of “Islamic State” as ISIS, reserving the former term for the political entity that controls them.) In the course of the following year Islamic State even lost some ground in Iraq, although claims by the Iraqi and United States governments that it had lost 25–30 percent of its territory were misleading: most of the “lost” territory was empty desert. In Syria ISIS made some modest advances in the north, but was finally defeated by intensive U.S. bombing and stiff resistance by the local Kurdish militia in a four-month siege of the city of Kobanî on the border with Turkey. It had better luck in the centre and south of Syria, achieving a foothold far to the west on the Lebanese border and even seizing control of Yarmouk, a southern suburb of Damascus with a largely Palestinian population, in March 2015. In both cases, however, ISIS troops were actually a small proportion of the rebel forces in the area, and were only able to operate there with the tacit permission of the Nusra Front, their most powerful
rival in Syria. (The two Islamist groups had established a de facto ceasefire after their four-month war in 2014 left al Nusra dominant among the rebel forces in the western, heavily populated half of Syria.) By contrast, the capture of the desert city of Palmyra and the adjacent gas fields in mid-May 2015 was an entirely ISIS-run operation.

Islamic State’s priority in 2014–15 was not territorial expansion. It was to create all the political, economic and legal institutions of a sovereign state on the land it already controlled and to build up its armed forces. It’s not that Abu Bakr al Baghdadi expects to be sending an ambassador to the United States any time soon, or even to be asked to join the World Trade Organization. (A state-owned airline would be nice, though, as at the moment it is still impossible to fly into or out of Islamic State territory on a commercial airline.) At this point the “caliph” and his colleagues are not looking for official recognition from other countries—just as well, since no other government on the planet approves of their new “state”—but they are very concerned to make their regime look credible as a state in the eyes of other Muslims. It doesn’t yet have its own currency, but it has released designs for gold, silver and copper coins of the Islamic dinar, allegedly supervised by Baghdadi himself, which will begin to circulate as soon as Islamic State can locate a mint and sufficient precious metals. It claims that a new currency would free Muslims from a world financial order that has “enslaved and impoverished” them, but for the moment it continues to use
dollars, euros and Iraqi dinars, mostly acquired by black–market oil sales.

The economy of Islamic State is ramshackle and rather vulnerable. The great majority of its 6–7 million people are farmers and small businessmen who get by much as they did before they were included within its borders, although with drastically reduced access to foreign goods. The money available to pay for the IS government and armed forces is adequate for the moment, but some of the revenue streams that sustain it are unlikely to survive in the longer term. The loot it acquired in the conquest of Mosul—up to $500 million seized from local banks, according to some (probably exaggerated) estimates—was a one-time gain that will not recur unless it manages to capture some other major city; and the substantial flow of cash donations from rich admirers in the Gulf states is in the process of being choked off by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf governments. Its income from ransoms for kidnap victims (an estimated $25 million so far) and from the sale of antiquities that it encourages local residents to dig up in exchange for a substantial chunk of the proceeds ($38 million) will doubtless continue, but that is only a drop in the bucket in relation to its needs.

Islamic State’s main cash cow so far has been the sale of black-market oil, mainly to Turkish customers. It is alleged to also be selling oil to the Syrian regime, and some of its enemies seize on this allegation as proof that it is really a tool of Bashar al Assad’s regime, created to discredit the
“real” revolutionary forces. But Damascus needs oil and Islamic State needs customers, and you don’t need a ceasefire to do this kind of deal. Just transfer the money, and IS will send some oil down one of the many surviving pipelines. It’s just business.

At the end of 2014, depending on whose estimate you believe, the oil was bringing in between $1 million and $4 million a day, but a combination of air strikes on oil wells and storage facilities within Islamic State territory and a crackdown on smuggling on the Turkish border is already cutting into that revenue stream. Which leaves only taxation, and while IS can and does collect taxes of various sorts from the population under its control, they are, for the most part, relatively poor people. It costs a lot of money to run a government that provides even minimal services to its people (basic medical care, garbage collection, clean water, and the like), and a lot more to pay for large armed forces. IS has not solved this problem, and it is unlikely to do so as long as it is confined within its present borders.

How large is its army? ISIS has certainly grown rapidly in numbers since its Iraqi conquests in the summer of 2014. A U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimate in September of that year calculated that ISIS had between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters, two to three times as many as it had at the start of the year. Another, rather hysterical estimate in November 2014 by Fuad Hussein, chief of staff to Kurdish president Massoud Barzani, put ISIS strength at 200,000 fighters or more.

Nobody doubts the fact that young Sunni men have been volunteering for service in ISIS in significant numbers, especially in the recently conquered areas of Iraq where Sunnis live in daily fear of the return of the Baghdad government and its Shia militias. But even if we accept the conclusion of a study by the Iraqi National Security Adviser’s office in Baghdad, produced before the events of June 2014, which stated that whenever one hundred (ISIS) jihadis enter a Sunni-majority district of Iraq, they soon recruit five to ten times their number of local volunteers, it is implausible that ISIS has 200,000 men under arms, unless part-time local militias are being included in that total. Full-time volunteers who can be sent wherever they are needed have to be armed, fed and paid. Assume that they are not getting paid the $400 a month that was once the rule for foreigner volunteers but only half that amount; assume also that the monthly cost of feeding, housing, arming and transporting them averages out at only another $100 a head, and the cost of maintaining an army of 200,000 men still works out to $60 million a month. Islamic State does not have that kind of money. A more plausible estimate would be around fifty thousand full-time fighters. That is quite a serious army if they are well trained, highly motivated troops, but it’s not exactly the Mongol hordes.

This is the army and state that the Iraqi and Syrian governments, and the United States and all its Western and Arab allies, have decided to take on and (in President
Obama’s words) “degrade and ultimately defeat.” That is not an impossible task, but it is bound to be a difficult and lengthy one. It will certainly not be accomplished by air power alone.

The idea that the United States or any outside power would perpetually defeat ISIL [i.e., ISIS] I think is unrealistic.… We can rout ISIL on the ground and keep a lid on things temporarily, but then as soon as we leave, the same problems come back again. So we’ve got to make sure that Iraqis understand [that] in the end they are responsible for their own security
.

President Barack Obama, press conference, August 28, 2014
²⁷

President Obama was talking about ISIS forces in Iraq, where the United States had already been carrying out air strikes for three weeks, but as he was about to close the conference one of the reporters called out asking what he planned to do about ISIS in Syria. The two are part of the same Islamic State, after all, and ISIS does not even recognize any border between them. “We don’t have a strategy yet,” said President Obama, a full three weeks after he authorized American air strikes in Iraq.
²⁸
It was unwise to say this in front of the American media, and they duly punished him for it, but there was a reason why he did not yet have a strategy. It was partly because it was hard to think of a strategy that would have a chance of eradicating
Islamic State without putting U.S. ground troops back into the Middle East, which was thought to be politically impossible in the United States after its experiences there during the past decade. Other Arab states, frightened by the rise of this monster in their midst, are willing to send their aircraft along to do some bombing too, but they are equally reluctant to commit ground troops to the conflict. But there was also the fact that Obama was trapped by his own past commitments.