ISIS: The Cornered Beast
The NY Review of Books
By Ahmed Rashid
Just
when Muslims around the world thought that ISIS was in retreat and that
it was safe to celebrate the end of Ramadan, the group has struck back
with a devastating series of bombings in
four Muslim countries. Claiming more than three hundred lives, most of
them Muslim, during the final days of the month-long fast, the attacks
in Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia have created
pandemonium.
But they also raise new questions about the ability of the
jihadist group to execute lethal terrorist attacks, even as its power
appears to be waning in Iraq and Syria. Since the early months
of this year, ISIS has suffered a series of defeats, from the Assad
regime’s recapture of Palmyra at the end of March to the Kurdish PYD’s
reconquest of the Manbij area of northern Syria in early June and Iraqi
forces’ retaking of Fallujah on June 22. ISIS
has also lost significant financial assets and population under its
control.
In a speech last month, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, an ISIS
spokesman, urged sympathizers to mark the month of Ramadan as “a month
of calamity,” but the world’s security agencies expected random,
“lone wolf” attacks. Instead, the recent bombings have been done by
groups of attackers who seem to have had a high degree of organization.
Many of the bombers themselves appeared to have been organized and
trained by ISIS or directly in touch with ISIS headquarters
in the Syrian city of Raqqa.
The sophisticated shooting and suicide attack on Istanbul’s
Ataturk Airport on June 28, in which forty-four people were killed and
more than two hundred injured, involved three attackers and
seemed to echo the carefully orchestrated group attacks in Brussels and
Paris last winter. Even deadlier was the Baghdad bombing, in which two
suicide bombers unleashed their explosives in a busy shopping district
early Sunday morning, killing more than two
hundred people. But for Muslims everywhere, the most inconceivable and
abhorrent was the bomb set off on Monday morning outside the revered
Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, Saudi Arabia—the second most sacred
place in Islam, where the Prophet is buried. It
was one of three coordinated bombings in Saudi Arabia that day. (ISIS
has claimed responsibility for the attacks in Iraq and Bangladesh, but
not for the Saudi and Istanbul attacks.)
Some of the attacks were aimed at locations with large
numbers of foreign nationals. The Saudi attacks included one outside the
US consulate in Jeddah, while the attack on an upmarket restaurant
in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, was exceptionally brutal and clearly
targeted foreigners. Twenty foreigners—including nine Italians—and two
policemen had their throats slit after being held hostage in the
restaurant for almost twelve hours by a group linked
to ISIS. Bangladesh had never before experienced such a mass killing
and the government has remained in denial that ISIS was involved, even
after the group took responsibility and showed photos of the grinning
faces of the attackers.
Still, the greatest number of victims in this wave of
bombings has been Muslim and it has created an immense pall of fear
across the Arab world. Kuwait has undertaken mass arrests of suspected
bombers while the United Arab Emirates government has warned its
citizens not to wear traditional Arab clothing while abroad. Even
al-Qaeda criticized the Istanbul bombing, saying it was perverse to bomb
and kill so many Muslims. Unlike al-Qaeda, ISIS’s leaders
have held that everyone who does not adhere to its interpretation of
Islam is not a Muslim and can legitimately be killed.
The attacks came just as ISIS was losing ground in Iraq and
Syria. A few days before the strike in Istanbul, the city of Fallujah,
just 50 kilometers from the capital of Baghdad, finally fell,
after two years in ISIS captivity, to the combined forces of the Iraqi
army, US special forces and air power, and Shia militias backed by Iran.
Hundreds of ISIS fighters were killed during the prolonged battle and
hundreds more were killed when they tried
to flee the city in vehicles and were heavily bombed. The Iraqi army is
now gearing up to take the northern city of Mosul.
In northern Syria the US-allied Syrian rebel forces are
trying to surround Raqqa, threatening not only the capital of ISIS, but
also its main access points to Turkey and the outside world,
on which it depends for new recruits and supplies. These military
successes gave the impression that ISIS was seriously weakening, losing
crucial territory and large numbers of fighters.
But security agencies must now contend with the reality
that, despite these setbacks, ISIS can still mount highly organized
attacks with gunmen who are heavily armed and well-trained. Lone-wolf
attacks, like what happened in Orlando, tend to have a single specific
location, and target and trigger a by now well-rehearsed response from
security agencies. By contrast, group attacks taking place in several
locations of a city, such as the Brussels and
Paris attacks, require a sophisticated deployment of military and
police that many governments are not ready for.
Moreover, success against ISIS cannot be defined only on the
battlefield in a country as complicated as Iraq. The first problem is
the persistent sectarian conflict, with Baghdad tilting toward
Iraq’s significant Shia majority. The largely Sunni population of
Fallujah may have escaped from ISIS but many have fallen into the arms
of hostile Shia militias. The government in Baghdad has done little to
reign in these militias, some of which have been
carrying out reprisals against Sunnis in liberated cities. Meanwhile
the lack of proper provisions for the ever-growing refugee population
has created a deepening humanitarian crisis.
The Iraqi government itself, because of rampant corruption
and incompetence, is feared and disliked by many Iraqis, and especially
the Sunnis. It may be able to reconquer cities with American
and Iranian help, but it still cannot provide the infrastructure needed
for good governance. In many parts of the country, it is unable to
provide basic services, and it is doubtful it will be able to rebuild
cities and schools and hospitals quickly, in order
to get life back on track and allow millions of refugees to return.
Meanwhile in Syria, the brutal civil war, now in its fifth year, has
fragmented the country into fiefdoms and turned half the pre-war
population of 23 million into refugees.
The real lesson for the Iraqi government and its allies—as
well as its counterparts across the region, from Saudi Arabia and Turkey
to Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia, and others—is that it will take
much more than military victories and the recapture of territory to
defeat ISIS. It will take even more to cut off all the branches of
extremism that ISIS has established around the world, and that could
become a primary focus of the group as the territory
under its control rapidly shrinks. The military defeat of ISIS in Syria
or Iraq seems more than likely to unleash a greater wave of terrorist
attacks.