in Syria—but for entirely different reasons. Trump had long declared his intention to bring home American troops, or at least to extract them from the Syrian “mess,” and the withdrawal of the 2,000-strong US military force in the north-east of the country began on 6 October. The time had come: the troops were there to fight Isis and Isis had been defeated. The idea—pushed by Washington’s foreign policy establishment—that this small force could simultaneously protect the Kurds, defend against Iranian influence, weaken Bashar al-Assad, and deter Russia had always been unrealistic. Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara and Assad in Damascus, much though they dislike each other, were united in their determination to eliminate Rojava, the Syrian Kurdish mini-state which—with the assistance of American airpower and a limited number of US troops on the ground—had been established after the Syrian army withdrew from the area in 2012.
A US withdrawal may have been inevitable, but its shambolic on/off nature was not. Unlike the White House, the Pentagon wanted to keep a presence in Syria—however unclear its purpose in a region now under the sway of Russia, Iran, and Assad—and had not prepared contingency plans for withdrawal. In the ensuing shambles, the US military bombed its former headquarters in a cement factory near the city of Manbij and abandoned other bases to the Russians and the Syrian army. Trump’s tweet greenlighting a Turkish invasion of Rojava was—understandably—portrayed in the US media as gross treachery towards America’s brave allies, but it was no surprise to anyone in the region. In early 2018 Turkey invaded the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, north of Aleppo, and engaged in ethnic cleansing—no objection was raised in the US or elsewhere. Erdogan made it clear then that Rojava would be next. I was in Rojava at the time of Afrin’s fall and spoke to Kurdish leaders, who knew that fending off both Erdogan and Assad would be next to impossible. The area they controlled was flat and indefensible, so they had no real military option. Much of the population lived close to the Turkish border and even a small-scale Turkish incursion would turn them into refugees. These fears have now been realised, with some 132,000 Kurds displaced from the border region.
There was clearly a degree of complicity between the main players in Syria after Trump’s withdrawal of US protection from the Kurds, though all sides publicly expressed shock at what was happening. The Turkish invasion was limited to the area between the towns of Ras al-Ayn and Tal Abyad, involving only about 6,000 regular Turkish troops alongside a much larger force of irregular troops nominally belonging to the opposition Syrian National Army but operating under the authority of the Turkish army. In the event, the carve-up went smoothly from the point of view of its beneficiaries: the Turks took a couple of border towns; Russian and Syrian forces raced into cities like Manbij, Raqqa, and Kobani. Erdogan achieved his main aim: the break-up of Rojava and an end to the US-Kurdish military alliance. Both events have also benefited Iran, which faces problems with the Kurds within its own borders, while Russia has reinforced its position as the most important player in the Syrian conflict. The Kurds are the losers they always feared they would be. They are now trying to rescue whatever they can from the wreckage and to limit the ethnic cleansing of their communities by Turkey.
How much does Isis stand to gain from the collapse of the US-Kurdish coalition it has been fighting for the last five years? The turmoil will be all the greater because of Trump’s bizarre decision to reverse course and increase the number of US troops in the oil fields of eastern Syria. All this adds up to the sort of confusion that Isis has traditionally taken advantage of. Will it similarly be able to benefit from the situation in Iraq, as a disintegrating government grapples with an incipient uprising among its own Shia supporters? It may be that Isis no longer has the strength to exploit the division among its enemies. Movements that combine ideological fanaticism with military expertise can be lethally effective in warfare, but they need victories to validate the justness of their cause. Such victories now seem far off, but the removal of al-Baghdadi may make it easier for Isis to adapt to circumstances that are moving in its favour.
Could Isis Have Won? Could It Return?
11 November 2019
Could Isis have won the war in Iraq and Syria? Was it always inevitable that the reborn caliphate declared in 2014 after the capture of Mosul would be eliminated as a territorial entity less than five years later? These are important questions that are seldom asked because many observers condemn Isis as an unmitigated evil and fail to analyse its strengths and weaknesses. But these are important if we are to understand the chances of Isis resurrecting itself in Syria and Iraq or re-emerging under a different name with ostensibly different objectives. It is worth asking: what were the religious, military, political, social, and economic ingredients that went into creating and sustaining this extraordinary militarised cult that for a considerable amount of time controlled a state that extended from the outskirts of Baghdad to the hills overlooking the Mediterranean.
In retrospect, military defeats and victories acquire a false sense of inevitability about them, whether we are looking at the German defeat of France in 1940 or the claimed elimination of the last vestiges of Isis in 2019. Historians study long-term trends, but contemporary witnesses are more aware of the degree to which good or bad decisions determined the outcome of a conflict and that the result might have gone the other way. For instance, what would have happened if Isis had not attacked the Kurds, who would have been happy to stay neutral in both Iraq and Syria in the second half of 2014? This diverted Isis from its spectacularly successful assault on central government forces in both countries and precipitated the devastating intervention of US airpower. If the Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had not split the jihadi movement in Syria in 2013 by seeking to absorb his former proxy, the al-Nusra Front, back into the mother organisation, then Isis would have been in a much stronger position to fight a long war. Probably its very fanaticism—and its belief that it had a monopoly of divine support—prevented it showing greater political adroitness, but we cannot be sure.
As surviving Isis fighters staggered out of the ruins of their last stronghold at Baghuz on the Euphrates River on 23 March 2019, it was difficult to recapture the sense of dread that they had spread at the height of their success. I was in Baghdad in June 2014 when their columns of vehicles packed with gunmen were sweeping south as the regular Iraqi army divisions broke into fragments and fled before them. Some Iraqis, with a sense of history, compared the onslaught to that of the Mongol horsemen who captured and sacked Baghdad in 1258. Official spokesmen on television would stay silent or announce fictitious victories, so I would call policemen in towns in the path of Isis and ask what was happening. Often the calls revealed that it was advancing with frightening speed against crumbling or non-existent opposition. I remember thinking that reporters in Paris in May and June 1940 must have tracked the advance of German panzer divisions towards Paris with similar trepidation.
I learned that Isis had captured without resistance Saddam Hussein’s home city of Tikrit and had occupied the town of Baiji next to Iraq’s biggest oil refinery. Their fighters were going house-to-house examining identity cards and, to the dismay of inhabitants, taking away the IDs of unmarried women to be photocopied, presumably as prospective brides. I did not know at that stage the full details of what became known as the Camp Speicher massacre that Isis had carried out, slaughtering 1,700 Shia air force recruits outside Tikrit. Later I saw a horrible video of an executioner shooting the terrified young men in the head with a pistol on a landing stage by the Tigris, so their bodies fell into the water. On a bluff overlooking the river, the jihadis had dumped the bodies into pits amid old half-ruined palaces of Saddam Hussein.
Isis might have made a quick dash for Baghdad in a bid to create a mass panic among the capital’s Shia majority. There were rumours that the Sunni minority inside the city would rise up in coordination with Isis units attacking from the outside. I suspected that talk of Isis “sleeper cells” was exaggerated and that it was outrunning its military resources. Moreover, the Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani had called on 13 June for a mass levy of all
