Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State (10 page)

Besides these fundamental contradictions, ISIS as a state has two critical military weaknesses. One is territorial, the other a question of personnel. ISIS doesn’t govern a large, fertile, evenly populated block of territory. Rather, it controls a network of cities separated by significant distances, surrounded by sparsely populated desert and mountains, and connected by road networks, fibre-optic and telecommunications links, smuggling routes and water sources including the Euphrates river and several major lakes and dams. This renders it highly vulnerable to interdiction: it’s a “network state” that can be defeated piecemeal if sufficient pressure is brought to bear on the connections between its constituent cities. Furthermore, 25,000 fighters may seem a lot, but ISIS has nowhere near enough troops to simultaneously defend its cities against external attack and secure them against internal opposition. And there are anti-ISIS movements in Mosul, Ramadi, Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor – even, after all this time, in the ISIS capital of Raqqa. An internal armed resistance against ISIS, if coordinated with an external attack on the cities it controls, could quickly overwhelm the Islamic State’s defences.

Such an internal uprising is unlikely to happen, though, while the forces attacking ISIS in Syria belong primarily to Bashar al-Assad, and those attacking in Iraq are largely Iranian-backed Shi’a sectarian militias. Local Sunni populations in ISIS-controlled areas may hate the group, but they often see the alternatives as even worse – in part because the militias have committed horrendous sectarian abuses after recapturing ISIS territory (most recently near Tikrit in April 2015) but also because ISIS is still peddling sectarian fear of the Shi’a, or of the chaos that would result from its fall, presenting itself as defender of the Sunnis. This goes back to AQI and Zarqawi and their cynical manipulation of 2005–06, but the fact that it’s cynical doesn’t make it untrue. The technique has a long pedigree in Iraq, and that’s my last point on ISIS as a state – it’s a state of fear.

Kanan Makiya, in his book on modern Iraqi politics,
Republic of Fear
, explains how Saddam’s regime fostered sectarian and ethnic tensions, engaged in ISIS-like acts of exemplary brutality, such as public hangings, corpse displays and torture, and talked up the potential for chaos in the event of the regime’s fall, as part of a divide-and-rule strategy. He showed how, after the Iran–Iraq War and its defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam’s regime moved from being overtly secular to attempting to Islamise Iraqi society as a bulwark against Iran. Saddam stoked sectarian fears and sought to present himself as defending Sunni Arabs against Shi’a Persians. Thus ISIS, with its Ba’athist lineage and jihadist facade, isn’t a departure from history: a straight line runs from Saddam’s republic of fear, through Zarqawi and Douri, to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic state of fear.

If Islamic State is a state, albeit a revolutionary, totalitarian, aggressively expansionist one, then this also tells us what it’s not. It is not (or is no longer) an insurgency. Nor is it a transnational terrorist movement in the AQ sense – one that uses violence in a strategy of “propaganda of the deed” to provoke a global revolution. Sure, ISIS uses exemplary violence as an instrument of policy and a means of terrifying its enemies, but so do plenty of states. As Audrey Cronin has persuasively argued, ISIS “uses terrorism as a tactic, [but] it is not really a terrorist organization at all . . . it is a pseudo-state led by a conventional army. And that is why the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies that greatly diminished the threat from al Qaeda will not work against ISIS.” I’d quibble with the term “pseudo-state,” but I couldn’t agree more with Cronin about the inapplicability of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing, since the beginning of the air campaign against ISIS, about the potential for the Western coalition to be dragged back into counterinsurgency, sucked once more into the quagmire of Iraq. This fear, in my view, is massively overblown – there is no chance that Western powers would seek, or the Iraqi government would allow, a repeat of the long-term occupation and reconstruction of Iraq that was attempted after 2003.

As Cronin points out:

Vast differences exist between the situation today and the one that Washington faced in 2006, and the logic of U.S. counterinsurgency does not suit the struggle against ISIS. The United States cannot win the hearts and minds of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, because the Maliki government has already lost them. The Shiite-dominated Iraqi government has so badly undercut its own political legitimacy that it might be impossible to restore it. Moreover, the United States no longer occupies Iraq. Washington can send in more troops, but it cannot lend legitimacy to a government it no longer controls. ISIS is less an insurgent group fighting against an established government than one party in a conventional civil war between a breakaway territory and a weak central state.

After 2003 in Iraq, Western powers had a legal and ethical obligation to stabilise the society we’d disrupted, establish a successor government to the regime we’d overthrown, protect an innocent population we’d put massively at risk, and rebuild the economy and infrastructure we’d shattered. No such obligation exists now – not for Iraq, which is sovereign and independent, and certainly not for Bashar al-Assad’s odious dictatorship in Syria. Western countries have a clear interest in destroying ISIS, but counterinsurgency shouldn’t even be under discussion. This is a straight-up conventional fight against a state-like entity, and the goal should be to utterly annihilate ISIS
as a state
. And this, of course, brings us back to the question of strategy.

AGE OF CONFLICT

A strategy for the future

Any strategy must address the full range of threats – not just that of terrorism, but also that of international instability and that of regional state-on-state conflict – arising from the blood year of 2014. In my view, such threats fall into four main categories, the first of which is domestic radicalisation.

As we’ve seen, this is perhaps better described as remote radicalisation – terrorists exploiting electronic means to project violence into our societies by mobilising vulnerable individuals. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, is one of many: others are Mohammed Merah (who killed French Jewish civilians and French soldiers in 2012), the Tsarnaev brothers (the Boston Marathon bombing), Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale (the 2013 Woolwich attack), Man Haron Manis (the 2014 Sydney siege), Michael Zehaf-Bibeau (the Ottawa shooting), the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly (the
Charlie Hebdo
and Montrouge massacres) and Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein (the 2015 Copenhagen shooting). All were radicalised through social networks (including social media) that gave them personalised access to Salafi-jihadist ideas, and the tactics to put those ideas into practice. Each is different, but the similarities – many had a history of petty criminality; several were adult converts to Islam; many were known to police for previous extremism; several attacked Jewish or military targets; all had active social media accounts; most acted independently without a larger support network; and (obviously enough) nearly all were military-aged males, mostly of Arab descent, with Muslim names – are striking.

It’s worth noting that the total death toll from these incidents is only about fifty – fifty-four, counting perpetrators – while the number of wounded is 319. This is utterly tragic for the individuals killed and maimed, and for their families, but it’s not a strategic-level threat to their countries. If you compare that toll, over the past six years, to the 9/11 attacks (2996 killed, more than 6000 wounded) or the Bali, Madrid and London bombings (together, 449 killed and over 3000 wounded in half that time – less than three years), it’s clear that Disaggregation, by removing the original al-Qaeda’s ability to execute large-scale complex attacks, has indeed reduced the scale of this threat.

The disaggregated terrorist franchises and radicalised individuals of today can mount a larger number of smaller, less sophisticated and far less damaging attacks. If this was the only outcome, you’d have to call the past fourteen years a resounding success – but, of course, that would be foolish. When you add the loss of life in Afghanistan and Iraq, consider the massive destabilisation, cost and disruption created, and think about the rise of ISIS as a direct outcome of the ill-judged invasion of (and equally ill-judged withdrawal from) Iraq, it’s a much worse picture. It’s worse again if you count Yemeni, Syrian, Libyan, Nigerian, Malian, Somali, Kenyan and Pakistani lives lost as a result of the War on Terror. Obviously, claims that “ISIS is not an existential threat” are accurate if we focus solely on acts of terrorism – but, again, it’s foolish to frame the threat in such a narrow way, since the existence and growth of ISIS has triggered an escalating conflict whose consequences are indeed existential for many regional states, and whose global effects could be hugely damaging.

Equally obviously, radicalised individuals, operating alone, without complex support networks, making limited use of firearms or explosives – members of what I’ve just described as the ISIS Internationale – have a much lower profile than traditional insurgents or terrorist cells. So detecting them before they strike is extraordinarily difficult, unless we’re prepared to accept massive intrusion by security agencies into every aspect of our daily lives, online activity and social networks. That means we have a choice: learn to live with this background threat level, or decide how much freedom we’re prepared to trade for security against it. This is likely to be a constantly shifting balance.

If one lesson stands out from the past fourteen years, it’s that terrorism is a dynamic threat, complex and multi-factorial, continuously adapting and morphing in response to our actions – not a static phenomenon. Thus, current conditions may not last very long. Indeed, the rise of ISIS has coincided with a sharp spike in self-radicalised attacks, and as Western governments act to prevent fighters travelling to join the group these attacks may spike further, with people who can’t get to Syria deciding to act where they live. Clearly, there’s only a limited role for the military here, and no one-size-fits-all answer. The threat, in democracies, must be handled primarily through political leadership, law enforcement and public engagement. There are also differences in dealing with communities from which remotely radicalised individuals may emerge.

The circumstances of French Muslims in the
banlieues
around Paris differ greatly from those of Asian communities in the British Midlands, Somali-Americans in Minnesota or Lebanese-Australians in Sydney. The types of violent radicalism that can occur are different, and each society needs to decide for itself an appropriate response. Some Western governments have orientalised Muslim immigrant populations, treating them as alien, exotic, potentially violent implants which have to be handled with kid gloves via self-appointed intermediaries who are often old, male and socially and religiously conservative. This approach is understandable, but it treats young people, who may already feel marginalised and disenfranchised within the wider society, like second-class citizens in their own communities, and it impedes the integration of those communities into the wider society. If anything, it may encourage radicalisation; this may in part explain why a significant number of ISIS recruits are young women.

It also creates a moral hazard for leaders of minority communities, who can be tempted to exploit the risk of violence or claim victim status to opt out of social norms or seek special treatment. A better approach – which also happens to be fairer and more democratic – is to treat members of minority communities exactly as we treat everyone else, with all the individual rights, obligations and expectations that come with being free members of an open society. At the same time, we need to make it clear that the values that define those societies – individual liberty, rule of law, religious freedom, gender and racial equality, free speech, equal opportunity – aren’t up for discussion. If members of our societies commit criminal acts, they need to be dealt with, just like anyone else, through the justice system.

The second threat, closely related to the first, is that of foreign fighters travelling to Iraq and Syria, and increasingly to Libya, Yemen and Somalia, to join terrorist organisations. We’re not just talking about ISIS fighters here, though they are by far the largest group at present. This threat – and that of violence on their return – has received much attention, in part because a great deal of intelligence and domestic-security funding is tied to it. It has been exacerbated by the fact that many new recruits to ISIS have Western passports, European faces and no known links to terrorist organisations – they’re “clean-skins,” in the jargon of counterterrorism bureaucrats – meaning that it would be relatively easy for them to rein-filtrate their parent societies after a stint with ISIS. In my view, this fear is a little overblown.

ISIS has gained recruits so quickly not only because its propaganda is slanted towards English-language media, making it highly accessible, but also because its standards are so low. If you want to join al-Qaeda, you need some knowledge of Salafi Islam, a certain level of physical fitness and some military potential. In contrast, ISIS pulls in large numbers of volunteers, many with no knowledge of Islam, limited physical and mental aptitude, and no military skills to speak of. It selects and trains them in camps in Syria and Iraq, but uses most foreign fighters as cannon fodder (the term “useful idiots” comes to mind once again), masking the Ba’athist thugs and AQI veterans at the core of the group’s combat capability.

My impression, from watching AQI develop in Iraq at first hand in 2005–07 (and from tracking its evolution into ISIS after 2011), is that it tends to “burn” Western volunteers for the most risky missions, to rid itself of newcomers who might challenge the existing power clique. Those who survive are relegated to duties with little influence, and those who try to leave are killed. Anyone thinking of joining ISIS needs to understand that the chance of being killed (by the organisation, which takes an extremely dim view of waverers, or by its opponents) is extremely high, but the chance of contributing anything is extraordinarily low, as is the likelihood of making it back. Rates of return for foreign fighters have been less than 10 per cent, and recent steps by governments to criminalise travel to join ISIS, and deny return to those who have done so, will lower these rates even further for Islamic State supporters.