War In The Age of Trump. Patrick Cockburn

The Turkish consulate stayed in Mosul after Isis stormed the city, though its diplomats came to regret this. Another explanation, though the two do not contradict each other, is arrogance and belief in divine support that had apparently been confirmed by miraculous victories in 2014. Cult-like military movements with the belief that they have a monopoly of truth and righteousness are a potent force on the battlefield because their members are willing to die for the cause. But because they divide the world into black and white, right and wrong, they have a self-defeating pattern of treating all the world as their enemies and are incapable of creating alliances: It may be that as a militarised Islamic cult, which saw the world in terms of friends and enemies, Isis was ideologically incapable of the flexibility necessary to make even a temporary accommodation with anybody outside its camp. A similar mistake was made by two movements that somewhat resemble Isis: the Khmer Rouge, who took over in Cambodia in the 1970s despite being bombed by American B-52s, and the Shining Path movement in Peru in the 1980s. The Khmer Rouge won their war against government forces but then turned on their former mentors in Vietnam, with disastrous consequences for themselves. The Shining Path came from nowhere, had few resources and no allies, but held a large part of the Peruvian highlands for years using unrelenting violence against all comers. Isis was a similarly self-isolating fanatical movement that was ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer number of its enemies: Iraqi and Syrian governments, Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, the US and Russia, Iran and Turkey.

      Isis went down, but it did not go down without a fight. It developed a form of warfare which enabled it to withstand for a long time the attack of its better-equipped and far more numerous enemies. Isis units were mobile light infantry specialising in irregular warfare of a type in which suicide bombers, snipers, and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) played a central role. “I cannot think of a single successful armed opposition attack in Syria that did not use suicide bombers,” a foreign military specialist in Damascus told me. The same was true of Iraq where even after the Iraqi army was receiving close ground support from US air strikes, Isis was able to capture the main government stronghold in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, on 17 May 2015, and, a few days later, seize the famed city of Palmyra in Syria.

      Religious fanaticism wedded to military efficiency is a formidable weapon, but the two do not automatically come together. Isis was the lineal descendent of al-Qaeda in Iraq, established by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2004. It was notorious for its ferocity and sectarianism, but US officers did not rate its infantry skills very highly. This was to change after its resurrection on the back of what was essentially a Sunni Arab uprising starting in Syria and spreading to Iraq in 2012–13. Some commentators have argued that the military expertise of Isis shows the influence of highly trained men who had once belonged to Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard and Special Forces. Isis doubtless benefited from their experience: the predominantly Sunni Arab city of Mosul was the main recruiting ground for the Iraqi officer corps under Saddam and his defence ministers normally came from Mosul and Nineveh province that surrounded it.

      A more convincing explanation for the military effectiveness of Isis is simply that it had experience. By the time a few thousand of its fighters took Mosul in June 2014, some of its commanders would have been fighting for a decade. Considering this, I was reminded of the reply of a UN military expert in Lebanon whom I had asked why the Hezbollah fighters were such good soldiers. He said: “If you have been fighting the Israeli army for a dozen years and you are still alive, you are probably pretty good at your job.”

      The same was true of Isis: It had fought the Americans and a chaotic but still numerous and well-armed Iraqi army and assorted militias. Its tactics were fluid and sophisticated: its motorised columns attacked unexpectedly from different directions at the same time, while its local commanders (emirs) were given objectives at the last moment, but would decide themselves on the best mode of attack. Fighting in the open became too costly in the face of US air superiority, so Isis tactics changed accordingly. In the sieges of Mosul and Raqqa—main topics in this book—Isis deployed swiftly moving squads in built-up areas, sometimes with a guide on a motorcycle. They would set up a sniping position in a house, break through its walls to enable quick entry and escape, and then, after opening fire, rapidly retreat before their position was identified and hit by a retaliatory air strike. Often, the only casualties were the civilians who lived in the house who had been locked in a room and could not get out in time. US and other western air forces boasted of the accuracy of their missiles and smart bombs, but this was beside the point if they did not know where Isis fighters were hiding. Despite the vaunted concern about civilian casualties—and condemnation of the Russians and Syrian government for targeting civilians—the US air force turned Raqqa and the Old City of Mosul into heaps of ruins, much as the Russians and Syrian government had done in east Aleppo and Homs, along with Daraya, Barzeh, and eastern Ghouta in Damascus.

      The military prowess of Isis was flattered by the weaknesses and divisions of its enemies, particularly during the early years of its resurgence between 2011 and 2014. This was certainly true of Iraq, where the state was thoroughly criminalised and its army so corrupt that colonels would pay $200,000 and generals $1 million for their jobs. They paid so much because they knew that they could turn a profit by pocketing the pay of “ghost” battalions that never existed or half the salaries of soldiers who never went near a barracks. On top of that, there was the flow of protection money from checkpoints that acted like customs posts and levied a charge on every passing vehicle.

      I had written a series of articles about the state of Iraq in 2013, ten years after the US-led invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I thought I was shockproof when it came to corruption in the Middle East, but, even so, I found that the kleptocracy in Iraq beggared belief: during my first days in Baghdad while writing the series mentioned above, there was heavy rain. This led to streets in large parts of the city turning into dirty grey lakes of floodwater and sewage, though the authorities had supposedly spent $7 billion on building a new drainage system for the capital. It turned out not to exist and the money allocated to it had all been stolen.

      At the end of the day, an Isis blitzkrieg and a dysfunctional Iraqi military were not enough to give Isis victory. Its use of mass terror, publicised by the internet, as a strategic weapon was successful in intimidating many people, but it made even more of them determined to fight to the death. For a fleeting moment after the fall of Mosul, Isis might have generated enough panic to break into Baghdad, but the opportunity was soon gone and would never return.

FIVE

       2016: Three States on the Edge of Disaster

       19 February 2016

      The war in Syria and Iraq has produced two new de facto states in the last five years and enabled a third quasi-state greatly to expand its territory and power. The two new states, though unrecognised internationally, are stronger militarily and politically than most members of the UN. One is Isis, which established its caliphate in eastern Syria and western Iraq in the summer of 2014 after capturing Mosul and defeating the Iraqi army. The second is Rojava, as the Syrian Kurds call the area they gained control of when the Syrian army largely withdrew in 2012, and which now, thanks to a series of victories over Isis, stretches across northern Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates. In Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), already highly autonomous, took advantage of Isis’s destruction of Baghdad’s authority in northern Iraq to expand its territory by 40 percent, taking over areas long disputed between itself and Baghdad, including the Kirkuk oil fields and some mixed Kurdish-Arab districts.

      The question is whether these radical changes in the political geography of the Middle East will persist—or to what extent they will persist—when the present conflict is over. Isis is likely to be destroyed eventually, such is the pressure from its disunited but numerous enemies, though its adherents will remain a force in Iraq, Syria, and the rest of the Islamic world. The Kurds are in a stronger position, benefiting as they do from US support, but that support exists only because they provide some 120,000 ground troops [35,000 each for two Peshmerga groups belonging to the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in northern Iraq and 50,000 Kurdish led