ISIS: Decimated and dangerous

At its peak in mid-2014, the Islamic State militant group, also known as ISIS, controlled territories the size of Great Britain. From Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria to the outskirts of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, its caliphate spread. It set up local administrations, banned music, movies, alcohol and cigarette, women were forced to cover their faces and men had to grow beards — all in compliance with Islamic law, its soldiers claimed. Religious police were deployed to make sure ISIS’s orders are obeyed. It also imposed taxes on local traders as well as special taxes on minority communities. Having control over some of Syria’s oil reserves in the east, it sold oil in the black market to raise funds. When the militia captured Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, they got hold of a large cache of weapons belonging to the Iraqi army. They also attacked Mosul’s banks, filling their coffers.

In effect, by July 2014, ISIS had set up an internal ecosystem for its proto-state. Unheard of even a year earlier, the group’s rapid rise as a potent terrorist machinery with control over territories that practically erased the Iraqi-Syrian border was nothing but phenomenal. Still, in less than four years, ISIS lost most of its territories in Iraq and Syria. Thousands of its soldiers were killed. Its leader, the self-proclaimed Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is on the run. How did this happen?

Marked man: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph, is on the run four years after the rise of ISIS

Where ISIS erred was in its ambitions. As it expanded furiously across the troubled areas of Iraq and Syria, its leadership may have been led to believe they could perpetually broaden the caliphate through West Asia. It’s the declaration of the caliphate that set ISIS apart from other jihadist organisations with ideological similarities. Like ISIS, al-Qaeda too wants to turn the world into an Islamic emirate. But al-Qaeda has largely been a hit-and-run organisation, operating from caves, deserts or mountains, and targeting urban centres in Western countries or their allies. A caliphate, in Islamic history, is a state under the leadership of caliph, a successor to Prophet Mohammed. There have been four major caliphates down the centuries — Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, and Ottoman. After the Ottomans were defeated in World War I, the caliphate was dissolved in 1922. Since then, there were attempts to revive the caliphate as an institution, but none succeeded. And with the post-war international system evolving into nation states, the Muslim world, once ruled by caliphs, also embraced the change.

So when Baghdadi declared himself caliph in 2014 and announced the formation of a caliphate, he was not only declaring sovereignty over the millions living in the captured territories but also asking for loyalty from the world’s Muslims.

Both Baghdadi and his men did not want to settle on any borders. In ISIS propaganda messages, they kept talking of expanding the caliphate to “Rome”. As an immediate and more practical target, they wanted Baghdad, the seat of power during the Abbasid caliphate, and Damascus, the former provincial capital of the Mamluk empire. They may also have been inspired by the history of Saudi Arabia, a Wahhabi state established by Abdulaziz ibn Saud by brutally conquering local tribes in Arabia and unifying their lands.

But ISIS picked the wrong century. Unlike in the early 20th century, the structure of the international system comprising nation states is now almost settled, though power disparities, border disputes and military interventions still exist. The creation of a caliphate across the borders of two sovereign nations was itself an affront to the post-War international order. This, coupled with ISIS’s savagery and threats of permanent expansion, contributed to the fightback.

When ISIS captured Iraqi and Syrian towns, the locals welcomed them, hoping the new fighters would end sectarian violence and bring about stability. In Mosul, for example, Sunni anger against the sectarian policies of the Shia-dominated Iraqi government was palpable. The Syrian city Raqqa had already become a battleground for different militant groups when jihadists finally took control. This chaos and sectarian rivalry gave ISIS some influence among the local populace. But once it established authority, it turned ruthless. Dissenting voices, including those from other jihadist groups, were suppressed and ISIS-appointed committees ruled through fear. It also managed to get thousands of foreign fighters to join its ranks, mainly through internet-based recruiting. Its internet ecosystem routinely published videos of executions and messages for potential jihadists; it even brought out an English magazine called Dabiq for propaganda.

On the watch: By early 2016, the ISIS caliphate had stagnated, surrounded by enemy forces on all sides — the government troops and Peshmerga in Iraq, and the Kurdish militias, rebels and government troops in Syria. A file image of a member of the Kurdish Peshmerga near Tikrit

On the ground, after the capture of Mosul, their greatest victory, ISIS fighters tried to march in all directions in pursuit of the caliphate dream. The main target was Baghdad, and they captured many towns in central Iraq such as Hawja and Rawa. Early in 2015, ISIS captured Ramadi, about 120 km west of Baghdad. Parts of Fallujah, about 69 km west of Baghdad, had been under its control since January 2014. The advances alarmed the Iraqis. As also the Iranians, for whom Iraq was not only an ally but also a buffer between their country and the Sunni Arab world. Iraqi troops were demoralised. Most American forces had left the country as part of President Barack Obama’s withdrawal plan. Iraqi soldiers fled Mosul, abandoning weapons and stripping off their uniforms, when ISIS marched into the city. Iran stepped in to fill the vacuum. The Iran-trained Popular Mobilisation Units (al-Hashd al-Shabi) joined hands with Iraqi soldiers to set up defence positions around Baghdad. They first stopped ISIS in its tracks and then gradually started pushing them back.

Stopped in central Iraq, ISIS tried to move towards Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan, located only 81 km east of Mosul. But their advances were successfully thwarted by the Peshmerga, the militia of the Iraqi Kurdistan who were provided air cover by American jets. On the north-eastern border of the ‘caliphate’, the Syrian-Turkish border areas, the jihadists came under heavy ground attacks by the Syrian Kurdish rebels. In the Syrian border Kobane, ISIS suffered its first major defeat since the caliphate was announced, at the hands of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a militia of Syrian Kurds.

On its west, ISIS’s plan was to move towards Damascus and unseat President Assad. It reached the central city of Palmyra, known as the ‘Venice of the Sands’, in May 2015, when the government troops, attacked by many fronts including the US and Arab-sponsored rebels, withdrew under strain. It appeared then that the Syrian regime was on the brink of collapse. It lost eastern Aleppo, the largest city and a commercial hub. It lost Idlib province and was struggling in the central province of Homs. The vast deserts in the southwest were out of bounds for the government.

But there was a twist in Syria. In September 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent aircraft as well as limited ground troops to Syria. Their mission: bolster the Assad regime. Russia then carried out a massive air campaign in Syria, mainly targeting non-ISIS rebel groups, which were the immediate threat to the regime. The Russian intervention was one of the pivotal moments of the Syrian civil war, tilting the balance of power in favour of the regime. By December 2016, the Assad regime was winning the war. It captured Homs from rebels, ousted ISIS from Palmyra, neutralised the rebels in the Damascus suburbs and seized Aleppo. The restoration of the regime, at great human cost, has killed off the possibility of ISIS marching towards Damascus. The Obama administration, which in the early days of the civil war, called for Assad to step down, changed its focus from regime change to defeating ISIS.

By early 2016, the ISIS caliphate had stagnated, surrounded by enemy forces on all sides — the government troops and Peshmerga in Iraq, and the Kurdish militias, rebels and government troops in Syria. The US and Russia continued to provide air cover to their allies. When these forces started pushing into the ISIS territories, the jihadists retreated from offence to defence. But it was too late. Their borderlines already vulnerable, the ISIS kept losing territories. By February 2017, ISIS was effectively put in a desert box in Syria, with only Raqqa and Deir Ezzor remaining its major occupied areas.

On the Iraqi side, the government troops, aided by Shia militias and covered by US jets, pushed into ISIS territories in the north. The group lost city after city such as Ramadi, Fallujah and much of the Nineveh province, where Mosul, the jewel in the ISIS crown, is located. In October 2016, after delaying several times earlier, the Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi finally announced the mission to recapture Mosul. It was perhaps the largest military operation the post-Saddam Iraqi army initiated. It was from the Grand al-Nuri mosque in the Old City of Mosul that Baghdadi had declared himself the ‘caliph’.

About two months into the battle, ISIS released an audio message of Baghdadi, his first in almost a year, in which he urged fighters to “hold your ground with honour”. Iraqi troops advanced from the eastern outskirts of Mosul. The elite US-trained anti-terror soldiers led the campaign, while the Shia Popular Mobilisation Units and the Kurdish Peshmerga also joined in. They moved inch by inch, first liberating eastern Mosul and then entering the west, where ISIS was much more entrenched. By late June 2017, more than eight months after they launched the operation, Iraqi troops finally entered the Grand al-Nuri mosque compound. The mosque’s leaning minaret had sported the ISIS black flag for three years, until the mosque was blown down by ISIS a few days before Iraqi troops entered the premises. Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi lost no time in announcing the “end of the false caliphate”.

To be sure, the physical ‘caliphate’ is shrinking. The fall of Mosul is the greatest setback for the ISIS in the more than three-year-long war. Its propaganda blitzkrieg has taken a hit and its links to the outside world have also been severed. Even the task of drawing new recruits to Syria and Iraq has been scuttled. But these setbacks do not necessarily mean that ISIS is defeated. A number of factors, in fact, suggest otherwise — the group continues to pose a great threat.

The ISIS controlled territory the size of Great Britain

With the liberation of Raqqa and Deir Ezzor in Syria and Qaim in Iraq in late-2017, ISIS lost all its urban centres. But its organisational network and fighting force are far from destroyed. Even during the war, ISIS had shown battlefield manoeuvrability and tactical retreats. It didn’t fight till the last, as Baghdadi had urged. Instead, ISIS fighters retreated into deserts or mountainous villages once defeat appeared certain. When Raqqa and Deir Ezzor fell, the remaining ISIS fighters either crossed the border into Iraqi deserts or went to Syria’s Idlib province, where al-Qaeda’s Syria branch (Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) has a base. In Idlib, ISIS is trying to regroup itself by targeting al-Nusra and attracting jihadists to its fold.

Second, there’s no guarantee the ISIS won’t resurface in the cities it lost. It has done it earlier, re-entering both Kobane and Palmyra months after being driven out, only to be defeated again. This time, one could argue, the losses are much higher. ISIS has lost thousands of fighters and major territories. But the freed cities, including Mosul and Raqqa, remain volatile with the respective governments struggling to establish order after years of conflict. Besides, geopolitical faultlines of West Asia, especially those of Iraq and Syria that helped ISIS rise in the first place, remain unchanged. In Iraq, a greater challenge before the government is to win over the people in the north, mostly Sunnis, who distrust the Shia-dominated government. ISIS’s predecessor al-Qaeda in Iraq had also suffered huge military setbacks in 2006-08 after the death of its leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Al-Qaeda was down, but was never defeated. Its fighters retreated to the deserts, waiting for the right opportunity to strike back. They got one when the sectarian policies of the then Iraqi government led by Nuri al-Maliki triggered widespread resentment among the Sunni population in the north and west. Now, Prime Minister Abadi’s challenge is to stop history repeating itself. He has to rebuild Mosul and other liberated parts and ease the sectarian tensions — a difficult task given the historical baggage of Shia-Sunni rivalry, as well as the existing social and military equations.

In Syria, the battle against ISIS is more complicated than in Iraq. In Iraq there is at least a consensus over who the legitimate force against ISIS is. All players, from the US and Kurds to Iran and Shia militias rallied behind the Iraqi government in the war. But in Syria, there’s no such consensus. In the liberation of Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, both the US-backed SDF and the Russia-backed government troops took part.

Turkey, another country that is involved in the civil war through its proxies, is wary of the SDF because it’s led by Syrian Kurdish rebels. Turkey sees any military empowerment of the Kurds as a threat, as it is fighting militancy by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on its soil. A few months after the liberation of Raqqa, north-eastern Syria is already in flames. In January 2018, Turkey launched an attack to drive the Kurdish YPG out of the border town of Afrin. If Turkish proxies, backed by Turkey’s Air Force, win in Afrin, they are likely to march towards other YPG-held territories, which means Syria is unlikely to be stabilised in the near future even if the government troops continue to win over rebels.

Third, ISIS is fundamentally an insurgency that transformed itself into a proto-state. Now the proto-state has crumbled, but the group can retreat to insurgency for survival. The history of insurgent groups suggests that it is difficult to defeat them outright. Take the more recent examples of jihadist insurgencies. The Taliban regime was toppled and its fighters were driven out of Kabul in 2001 following the US invasion. Their leader, Mullah Omar, died in hiding. Yet, more than 16 years after the Taliban regime was toppled, the group is controlling or contesting almost 40 per cent of Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda is another example. After the Taliban were toppled, al-Qaeda was forced to flee to the mountains. Its leader Osama bin Laden was killed when hiding in Pakistan. Still al-Qaeda made a comeback by mobilising jihadists in Africa, Syria and Yemen. The group carried out terror attacks in 2015 and 2016 in African countries, from Mali to Burkina Faso, in an apparent global competition with ISIS. A more specific example would be al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was almost defeated once, only to morph into today’s ISIS as a more vigorous, deadly force.

Lastly, ISIS has shown a great amount of manoeuvrability over the past four years. When it started losing territories at its core, it fast expanded in other countries. Now ISIS has a “province” in eastern Afghanistan (which they call Khorasan) and affiliates in Nigeria and Pakistan. In Bangladesh, ISIS has claimed attacks. The group has also managed to convince several Indians to travel to its Afghanistan province. Further, it has urged supporters to carry out attacks in “crusader nations” and declare their allegiance to the “caliph”. This is a dangerous phase. Irrespective of the setbacks suffered at its core, ISIS has transformed its ideology — which, at the advent of the group, was seen as an isolated, barbaric world view propagated by a few wrongful human beings — into a globalised force. This means even if ISIS is defeated militarily, the threat it poses is not going to subside anytime soon.

Stanly Johny’s ISIS Caliphate: From Syria to the Doorsteps of India will be published in April 2018 by Bloomsbury India