to inflict maximum damage. They got their calculations wrong in the end, but it remains unclear how the US would respond to a resumption of attacks on US allies as opposed to US troops or embassies. In the wake of the Soleimani assassination, Iran might be less aggressive, but in the long term this type of irregular warfare is Iran’s main counter to the US policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran—effectively a tight economic siege—and will not be abandoned while sanctions continue.
21 November 2019
America’s first act in the war on Iraq was an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein. In the early hours of the morning of 20 March 2003, forty cruise missiles were launched and bunker-buster bombs dropped on a compound on the outskirts of Baghdad where US intelligence wrongly believed him to be staying. Three years later a US air strike succeeded in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the organisation that would become Isis. Neither Saddam’s survival nor al-Zarqawi’s death had much impact on the course of events, but the White House remained convinced that eliminating leaders and other high-value targets was a war-winning strategy. There is little evidence to support this theory; but still, the assassination of demonic opponents is clearly good politics, allowing American presidents to impress voters with decisive action amid what have been messy, inconclusive wars.
The death last month of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had led Isis since 2010, in a US raid in north-west Syria was celebrated in a self-glorifying speech by Donald Trump as proof that Isis had been definitively destroyed. The claim had some substance: al-Baghdadi, who five years earlier had declared himself caliph in the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, was the most important surviving symbol of Isis as a territorial state. The possession of an actual state—at its height it stretched across Syria and Iraq, from west of the Euphrates to east of the Tigris—distinguished Isis from other militarised Islamic cults, like Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. For a brief, astonishing period, this reborn caliphate governed, in brutal but well-organised fashion, a population of ten million, claiming divine inspiration in its pursuit of true Islamic principles. Its rise was spectacular, but so was its fall: it lost its final piece of territory, a village in the desert on the Syrian side of the border, six months before al-Baghdadi’s death. He was reduced to moving from hideout to hideout in Idlib province, near the Turkish border, far from the Isis heartlands, with little control over Isis strategy or tactics—though it was always unclear whether he actually exercised full command.
The process of Isis decision-making over the last ten years—and al-Baghdadi’s role in it—is a mystery. If he was in total control of operations between 2011 and 2014, he can take credit for rebuilding Isis: he took advantage of the opportunities offered by the disintegration of Syria, and of Sunni resistance to a sectarian Shia government in Iraq. But after Isis captured Mosul in June 2014, almost every decision taken or endorsed by al-Baghdadi was disastrous. The caliphate in any case posed too much of a threat to other powers to last for long, but al-Baghdadi accelerated its demise by effectively declaring war against the entire world. Not everyone thought it in their interests to fight the new theocratic quasi-state: Kurds in both Syria and Iraq at first stayed neutral, opportunistically expanding their own territories as Isis battled the central governments in Baghdad and Damascus. But at the peak of Isis success, its fighters attacked the Kurds in both countries without provocation, making enemies of them—and, fatally, guaranteeing US involvement on the Kurdish side. In al-Baghdadi’s vision, to be outside Isis was to be an infidel by definition. Inevitably, the list of his opponents was all-encompassing: both the Americans and the Russians; both the Syrian government and the non-Isis armed opposition to that government. Countries which had once tolerated Isis—Turkey allowed 40,000 Isis fighters to cross the border into Isis territory—found that such covert co-operation was no guarantee that they themselves wouldn’t become a target.
Isis systematically publicised its atrocities on the internet in order to terrorise its opponents, a tactic which at first worked well but ended up mobilising those it threatened—such as the Shia in Iraq, who outnumber the Sunni population three to one. Outnumbered and outgunned, Isis would inevitably be ground down and crushed, with the Sunni community as a whole in the northern tier of the Middle East between the Iranian border and the Mediterranean suffering by association in the wake of their defeat.
The terror inflicted by Isis attacks around the world is not easily forgotten: 142 killed in Yemen when two Shia mosques were bombed; 103 peace protesters killed by a suicide bomber in Ankara; 224 blown up on a Metrojet flight to St Petersburg; 131 shot or bombed in the Paris attacks of 2015; 86 run down by a truck in Nice the following year; 593 killed in an operation in the Philippines the year after that; 311 killed when attackers opened fire during Friday prayers at a mosque in Sinai; 149 killed by a suicide bomber at an election rally in Pakistan—not to mention the eight killed in the UK in 2017 after a van drove into pedestrians on London Bridge.
So the prospect that Isis may still fight on remains a live concern around the world. Americans and Europeans may not care what happens to the Kurds, or who rules in Damascus and Baghdad, but they do worry about Isis—because Isis is a threat to themselves. In the coming presidential election campaign, Trump will try to capitalise on the assassination of al-Baghdadi, as Hillary Clinton tried to capitalise on the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, however little she had to do with it. It’s a dangerous strategy: it takes only one spectacular attack, like the co-ordinated series of suicide bombings at churches and hotels in Sri Lanka in April this year, for Isis yet again to contradict claims of its demise. Its defeats on the battlefield—especially the loss of Mosul and Raqqa after the sieges of 2017—have destroyed it as a territorial entity. But al-Baghdadi’s death makes its resurrection in new forms no less likely—perhaps more. Al-Qaeda franchises had greater success after the killing of bin Laden than they did during the years of his holdout in Abbottabad. Al-Baghdadi was a symbol of Isis in victory, but also of Isis in defeat. If it is to be revived, it will have to be with new methods and modified ideology: no longer seeking self-isolation above all, no longer punishing anyone not wholeheartedly in its own camp. Al-Baghdadi’s removal may make such a transformation easier to carry out.
That said, the obstacles are formidable. Until its apotheosis in 2014, opponents of Isis were willfully blind to its growing power, or thought they could turn it to their own advantage. They did not find it ominous that Isis had seized Fallujah, thirty miles west of Baghdad, and that the Iraqi army could not get them out. Earlier that month, Barak Obama had told David Remnick of the New Yorker that, compared to al-Qaeda, Isis was a junior varsity basketball team playing out of its league; a few months later, its fighters emerged from the desert to defeat six Iraqi army divisions and capture Mosul.
Wary of making the same mistake again, the US and its allies have remained on the alert for any sign that Isis may be back in business. But it is easy also to overestimate the threat it poses. If it is to do more than launch sporadic guerrilla attacks in isolated rural areas and stage periodic massacres of civilians abroad—if it is to re-emerge as a serious force in the region—Isis would have to persuade shattered Sunni communities and tribes in its former centres of power in Syria and Iraq that armed resistance is once again both feasible and necessary. Over the last decade, millions of them have had to flee their homes as cities from Aleppo and Homs to Mosul and Ramadi have been pounded into rubble by air strikes and artillery fire. US Central Command reports that between 2014 and 2019, it carried out a total of 34,573 air strikes on targets in Syria and Iraq, almost all of them in Sunni areas. Ferocious resistance by Isis fighters in Mosul and Raqqa resulted in unthinkable numbers of civilian dead. During the last months of the siege, I spoke to many people trapped in the Old City of Mosul. By the time the siege was over, everyone I had been in contact with was dead: killed by coalition air strikes if they stayed in their houses, or by Isis snipers if they tried to escape.
Until
