Modal Trigger
Masked Spanish police officers lead a detained woman in Melilla, December 16, 2014. Spanish and Moroccan police have arrested seven people in a ongoing joint swoop on suspected efforts to recruit women to go to Syria and Iraq to support Islamic State insurgents. Photo: REUTERS
This year marked the rise of ISIS. Will we do enough to make 2015 the year of its fall?
In fact, some suggest the Islamic State will collapse of its own weight.
A few Arab and Israeli observers are comparing ISIS to a swarm of locusts — which comes from nowhere, descending in huge numbers on the fields, eating anything that grows and then, just as quickly, disappears.
It’s certainly true that, like the crop-eating insects, these jihadis may well have chewed up more than they can swallow. They’re already finding it hard to manage some of the areas they captured in Syria and Iraq.
A veteran diplomat who travels often across the region to meet with top Arab leaders tells me that there’s a clash of cultures between occupier and occupied: “Most Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis aren’t all that religious. This [ISIS] fanaticism is alien to them,” he said.
Sunnis on both sides of the border, he added, are moved much more by tribal loyalties and nationalism than by fatwas issued in the name of Allah by mortals claiming to hear His message.
It could well be that, with time, the locals will just push the ISIS foreigners away, the diplomat said.
But he added a word of caution: For now, ISIS’ style of governing by fear is effective.
Mad gun-toting young men are ensuring that anyone suspected of harboring ill-will toward “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, or otherwise casting doubt on the group’s rigid ideology, won’t live to see the end of the day.
The locust analogy has other problems: What if ISIS mutates into a “bug” that doesn’t have to move on? And if this plague does move on, what if another one simply takes its place?
Worse: Consider just how much harm it can do while it lasts.
In 2014, ISIS acquired world-wide fame, morphing from what President Obama called a junior-varsity team to an enemy so formidable he vows to “degrade and ultimately destroy” it.
Even now, as the region’s sheiks, emirs, kings and generals watch helplessly, ISIS chews away more and more territory.
And even as its “rule by extreme cruelty” inflicts horror on those under its thumb, ISIS is a growing problem for us.
Its victorious aura of invincibility resonates among too many Muslims across the world. Some are mad enough, and inspired enough, to commit what we (for some reason) term “lone wolf” terror.
And that inspiration could outlast the locusts themselves. At the least, so long as ISIS stands, its “lone wolf” admirers keep exacting casualties far beyond the infected areas — in America, Europe and other free societies.
So Obama’s correct: ISIS must be degraded and then destroyed.
But our air sorties and minimal presence on the ground have yet to show even the first signs of success in degrading, let alone destroying.
And in today’s Arab world, a victory over a superior power is defined as anything less than complete, disastrous defeat. So the longer we fail to destroy ISIS, the more its legend will grow and inspire.
What’s needed is a much more aggressive military intervention, as well as much deeper involvement with potential allies on the ground.
But the Iraqi army at best will remain hopeless for most of the year. And while the Kurds are fine allies, they won’t confront ISIS in the Sunni areas, where the group is strongest.
What about Iran? First off, it’s not doing so well in the fight now — ISIS just killed its top commander in Iraq.
More important, relying on Iran and its pet Iraqi Shiite militias to move in means “worse than locusts” for the future: Their presence in Sunni areas will be so resented that they’ll just breed the next generation of jihadis.
No: Short of an all-out American-led war in Iraq and Syria, only Iraq’s Sunnis can defeat ISIS. But they won’t try unless Iraq’s new Shiite-led government grants them more power.
We must turn armed Sunni groups that are capable of confronting ISIS militarily, such as the Islamic Army in Iraq (despite the name, it’s more nationalistic than Islamist), into allies.
Again, it was Sunni anger at the sectarian Shiite government that opened the door to ISIS. If we force Iran-backed militias on them, even a decisive defeat of ISIS will be short-lived, as some other extremists quickly move in. Call it Son of the Locust.
The Day of the Locust ain’t over. If we don’t up our game in the fight against ISIS, the plagues will keep on coming.
Twitter: @bennyavni
No comments:
Post a Comment