Irregular War by Paul Rogers

Author:Paul Rogers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ISIS / Islamic State / Middle East / North Africa / international relations / terrorism / climate change / security / war / states
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2016-06-05T22:40:47+00:00

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ISIS and Its Future

In June 2014 a force of barely 1,000 paramilitary jihadists easily overran Iraq’s second city of Mosul, driving out a far larger Iraqi Army force and taking control of a huge quantity of vehicles, weapons and ammunition. Much of this was rapidly moved across north-western Iraq, over the border into Syria and to the centre of ISIS’s power – the city of Raqqa. The rapidity of the advance caught almost every analyst and intelligence specialist by surprise, especially as the movement went on to add to its existing control of substantial parts of Iraq’s Anbar Province, having already taken control of the key city of Fallujah six months earlier.

Together, these advances, and the shock of the change in the status of the movement soon to call itself ISIS, led to Western and regional countries recognising that an extreme Islamist group now controlled substantial territory in the heart of the Middle East, far more than was achieved by al-Qaeda in the previous two decades. While the territory did not include major oilfields, many smaller oilfields and local refineries were under ISIS’s control, as were some hydroelectric plants and irrigation dams. By July 2014 ISIS controlled land similar in size to the island of Britain and with a population of around 6 million. Much of the territory was desert or semi-desert scrubland, but the valley of the Euphrates and some of its tributaries was rich agricultural land, with the food produced there readily amenable to taxation.

Of even greater use to ISIS was the fact that, in recent times, the whole region had become a haven for smuggling, with a huge array of produce and consumer goods as well as oil and processed petroleum products, moving between northern Syria, northern Iraq and Turkey, with Iran also involved. Most if not all of the borders were porous, with numerous back routes available, but smuggling was, even so, a ready source of income for the movement, as those involved were willing enough to pay tolls for permission to move their goods.

ISIS had other sources of supply. These included financial support from abroad, particularly sympathetic wealthy individuals in western Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia, and it also had unexpected but very welcome windfalls, notably more than $400 million in Iraqi currency that was looted from banks when Mosul was taken.

The culmination of ISIS’s expansion came with the appearance of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in a mosque in Mosul on 5 July, and his declaration of an Islamic caliphate with himself as its head, stretching initially across substantial parts of Iraq and Syria but clearly with much greater ambitions. Even at this stage, ISIS differed substantially from the original al-Qaeda vision of a decade and a half earlier. The al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri was bitterly opposed to the near enemies comprising the apostate rulers in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in the region, with the greatest antagonism directed towards the House of Saud, the utterly unacceptable ‘Guardian of the Two Holy Places’.

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