BY ZACK BEAUCHAMP JUN 18 2014
SIS used to be al-Qaeda in Iraq
An Iraqi soldier during a fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq in January 2014. Ali al-Saadi/AFP/Getty Images
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) used to have a different name: al Qaeda in Iraq.
US troops and allied Sunni militias defeated al Qaeda in Iraq during the post-2006 "surge" — but it didn't destroy them. The US commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, described the group in 2010 as down but "fundamentally the same." In 2011, the group rebooted. ISIS successfully freed a number of prisoners held by the Iraqi government and, slowly but surely, began rebuilding their strength.
ISIS and al-Qaeda divorced in February 2014. "Over the years, there have been many signs that the relationship between al Qaeda Central (AQC) and the group's strongest, most unruly franchise was strained," Barack Mendelsohn, a political scientist at Haverford College, writes. Their relationship "had always been more a matter of mutual interests than of shared ideology."
According to Mendelsohn, Syria pushed that relationship to the breaking point. ISIS claimed that it controlled Jabhat al-Nusra, the official al-Qaeda splinter in Syria, and defied orders from al-Qaeda's leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to back off. "This was the first time a leader of an al-Qaeda franchise had publicly disobeyed" a movement leader, he says. ISIS also defied repeated orders to kill fewer civilians in Syria, and the tensions led to al-Qaeda disavowing any connection with ISIS in a February communiqué.
Today, ISIS and al-Qaeda compete for influence over Islamist extremist groups around the world. Some experts believe ISIS may overtake al-Qaeda as the most influential group in this area globally.
ISIS wants to establish a caliphate
Their goal since being founded in 2004 has been remarkably consistent: found a hardline Sunni Islamic state. As General Ray Odierno puts it: "They want complete failure of the government in Iraq. They want to establish a caliphate in Iraq." Even after ISIS split with al-Qaeda in February 2014 (in large part because ISIS was too brutal even for al-Qaeda), ISIS' goal remained the same.
Today, ISIS holds a fair amount of territory in both Iraq and Syria - a mass roughly the size of Belgium. One ISIS map, from 2006, shows its ambitions stopping there - though interestingly overlapping a lot of oil fields:
ISIS/Aaron Zelin
Another shows their ambitions stretching across the Middle East, and some have apparently even included territory in North Africa:
Ali Soufan/ISIS
Now, they have no chance of accomplishing any of these things in the foreseeable future. ISIS isn't even strong enough to topple the Iraqi or Syrian governments at present. But these maps do tell us something important about ISIS: they're incredibly ambitious, they think ahead, and they're quite serious about their expansionist Islamist ideology.
The conflict betweeen Iraqi Sunnis and Shias sustains ISIS
Perhaps the single most important factor in ISIS' recent resurgence is the conflict between Iraqi Shias and Iraqi Sunnis. ISIS fighters themselves are Sunnis, and the tension between the two groups is a powerful recruiting tool for ISIS.
The difference between the two largest Muslim groups originated with a controversy over who got to take power after the Prophet Muhammed's death, which you can read all about here. But Iraq's sectarian problems aren't about relitigating 7th century disputes; they're about modern political power and grievances.
Hamdar Hamdani/AFP/Getty Images
A majority of Iraqis are Shias, but Sunnis ran the show when Saddam Hussein, himself Sunni, ruled Iraq. Saddam spread a false belief, still surprisingly persistent today, that Sunnis were the real majority in Iraq. Thus, Sunnis felt, and still feel, entitled to larger shares of political power than might perhaps be warranted by their size.
The civil war after the American invasion had a brutally sectarian cast to it, and the pseudo-democracy that emerged afterwards empowered the Shia majority (with some heavy-handed help from Washington). Today, the two groups don't trust each other, and so far have competed in a zero-sum game for control over Iraqi political institutions. For instance, Shia used control over the police force to arbitrarily detain Sunni protestors demanding more representation in government last year.
So long as Shias control the government, and Sunnis don't feel like they're fairly represented, ISIS has an audience for its radical Sunni message. That's why ISIS is gaining in the heavily Sunni northwest.
Iraq’s Prime Minister is making the ISIS problem worse
ISIS would be able to recruit Sunni fighters off of the Sunni-Shia tension even if Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki weren't in office, but his policies towards the Sunni minority have helped ISIS considerably.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shia Muslim, has built a Shia sectarian state and refused to take steps to accommodate Sunnis. Police have killed peaceful Sunni protestors and used anti-terrorism laws to mass-arrestSunni civilians. Maliki has made political alliances with violent Shia militias, infuriating Sunnis. ISIS cannily exploited that brutality to recruit new fighters.
When ISIS reestablished itself, it put Sunni sectarianism at the heart of its identity and propaganda. The government persecution, according to the Washington Institute for Near East Studies' Michael Knights, "played right into their hands." Maliki "made all the ISIS propaganda real, accurate." That made it much, much easier for ISIS to replenish its fighting stock.
Haidar Hamdani/AFP/Getty Images
That wasn't the only way the Iraqi government helped ISIS grow, according to Knights. The US and Iraqi governments released a huge number of al-Qaeda prisoners from jail, which he thinks called "an unprecedented infusion of skilled, networked terrorist manpower - an infusion at a scale the world has never seen." US forces were running sophisticated raids "every single night of the year," and Knights believes their withdrawal gave ISIS a bit more breathing room.
ISIS has a really important base in Syria
The crisis in Syria is one of the most important reasons why ISIS grew capable of mounting such an effective attack on the Iraqi government. To see why, take a look at this map from March, paying special attention to the blue ISIS-controlled areas in eastern Syria:
BBC/SNAP
The chaos in Syria allowed ISIS to hold this territory pretty securely. This is a big deal in terms of weaponry and money. "The war gave them a lot of access to heavy weaponry," Michael Knights said. ISIS also "has a funding stream available to them because of local businesses and the oil and gas sector."
It's also hugely important as a safe zone. When fighting Syrian troops, ISIS can safely retreat to Iraq; when fighting Iraqis it can go to Syria. Statistical evidence says these safe "rear areas" help insurgents win: "one of the best predictors of insurgent success that we have to date is the presence of a rear area," Jason Lyall, a political scientist at Yale University who studies insurgencies, said.
ISIS funds itself through oil and an extortion racket
Unlike some other Islamist groups fighting in Syria, ISIS doesn't depend on foreign aid to survive. In Syria, they've built up something like a mini-state: collecting the equivalent of taxes, selling electricity, and exporting oil to fund its militant activities.
My colleague Max Fisher has an in-depth breakdown of how they managed to do this, which includes extorting money from humanitarian workers and selling electricity to the Syrian government that it's currently fighting. There are two important takeaways here. First, as Max explains, these clever revenue bases have made ISIS much more effective on the battlefield than other militant groups:
This money goes a long way: it pays better salaries than moderate Syrian rebels or the Syrian and Iraqi professional militaries, both of which have suffered mass desertions. ISIS also appears to enjoy better internal cohesion than any of its state or non-state enemies, at least for the moment.
Second, it makes the idea that ISIS' near-term goal is to hold Iraqi oil and power facilities more credible. Check out this ISIS map showing the territory they'd like to hold in Iraq and Syria:
ISIS/Aaron Zelin
It obviously overlaps with a lot of oil. Now, ISIS would probably have a harder time exporting Iraqi oil than the Syrian oil they're currently selling. The oil deposits in the area that ISIS could plausibly captured aren't that extensive, and they're also not as developed as the current infrastructure ISIS controls in Syria.
Nevertheless, the ambitions in this map do suggest that ISIS sees oil as an important part of its future development
The global oil market is concerned about ISIS' advance
Iraq is home to the fifth-largest oil deposits in the world, and currently produces about 4 percent of global oil supply. So far, the ISIS conflict has yet to disrupt the big oil-producing areas in northeast and southeast Iraq. But nonetheless, oil markets are a little spooked.
As Brad Plumer points out, the Brent crude oil price — a good metric for global prices — has hit the highest levels since last September:
That's because, as Brad explains, the fighting has affected one major pipeline and could spread elsewhere:
But the fighting has threatened some of Iraq's other oil infrastructure, including a pipeline that can deliver 600,000 barrels of oil per day from Kirkuk to the Turkish port city of Ceyhan. (That pipeline had been damaged by a 2013 attack and was offline receiving repairs - that work has now been halted.)There's also potential for things to get a lot worse. If the conflict spreads further into the Kurdish regions, that could disrupt operations in the large Kirkuk oil field near the city of Mosul, which now produces around 260,000 barrels of oil per day - and accounts for one-sixth of the country's proven reserves. Iraq had plans to invest heavily in that oil field in the years ahead, and that's a lot harder now.
So depending on how the conflict goes, its effect on global oil prices could change dramatically.
The conflict has been a boon to Iraq's Kurds
Kurds are mostly Sunnis, but they're ethnically distinct from Iraqi Arabs. They control a swath of northeast Iraq where a lot of the oil fields lie, and are something of a wild card in the conflict between the Iraqi government and ISIS. But so far, they've come out ahead. "This crisis is a lifeline for the Kurds," says Iraqi politics expert Kirk Sowell.
Iraqi Kurdistan in northeast Iraq is governed semi-autonomously. The Kurdish security forces are partly integrated with the government, but there's somewhere between 80,000 and 240,000 Kurdish peshmerga (militias) who don't answer to Baghdad. They're well equipped and trained, and represent a serious military threat to ISIS.
You'll notice that Mosul is inside the dotted lines of territory under defacto Kurdish control. Indeed, according to Knights, Kurdish security forces control eastern parts of the city. More broadly, Iraqi Kurdistan borders ISIS territory at a number of different points.
So far, there hasn't been any major conflict between the Kurds and ISIS. The Kurds have taken advantage of the chaos to occupy Kirkuk, a city near massive oil deposits that they've wanted for some time. That means the crisis has been, in a strange way, a boon to the Kurds - provided that they can remain out of the fighting.
IS isn’t the only anti-government rebel group
This conflict often gets portrayed as a fight between the Iraqi government and ISIS. That's overly simplistic on two levels: the Iraqi government has assistance from Iran and Shia militias, while ISIS isn't the only group battling the Iraqi government.
The most important rebel group beyond ISIS is Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandia (JRTN). They're Sunni nationalists, many of whom are former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party loyalists. Its leader is Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, a former Saddam deputy.
Sunni militiamen in 2010. Mahmud Saleh/AFP/Getty Images
JRTN doesn't share ISIS' militant Islamist outlook — they want to install a Sunni dictatorship. But the two are both more interested in fighting Maliki's Shia government than each other.
Of the two, ISIS is stronger. "I can say that ISIS is not a majority on the grassroots level," Kirk Sowell, a political risk analyst and expert on Iraqis politics, reported. "That said, they're the most organized and their fighters are very battle-hardened, having spent years fighting in Iraq and Syria. The JRTN is also very well organized, but they're not as large and they don't have the financial resources."
ISIS has made significant territorial gains in Iraq
ISIS' major breakthrough was a victory in Mosul, a northern Iraqi city and the country's second most populous. Since then, they've made rapid advances, as this New York Times map of ISIS' progress details:
Combine that with ISIS territory in Syria, and they control a snaking band of territory that some experts say amounts to roughly the area of Belgium:
BBC
The Iraqi army is much stronger than ISIS, but it’s also kind of a mess
ISIS cannot challenge the Iraqi government for control over the country. On a basic level, it's simple math. A rough count of ISIS' fighting strength suggests it has a bit more than 7,000 combat troops, and it can occasionally grab reinforcements from other extremist militias. The Iraqi army has 250,000 troops, plus armed police. That Iraqi military also has tanks, airplanes, and helicopters. ISIS can't make a serious play for the control of Baghdad, let alone the south of Iraq, without a serious risk of getting crushed.
But the Iraqi army is also a total mess, which explains why ISIS has had the success it's had despite being dramatically outnumbered.
STR/AFP/Getty Images
Take ISIS' victory in Mosul. 30,000 Iraqi troops ran from 800 ISIS fighters. Those are 40:1 odds! Yet Iraqi troops ran because they simply didn't want to fight and die for this government. There had been hundreds of desertions per month for months prior to the events of June 10th. The escalation with ISIS is, of course, making it worse.
Sectarianism also plays a role here. The Iraqi army is mixed Sunni-Shia, and "it appears that the Iraqi Army is cleaving along sectarian lines," Yale University insurgency expert Jason Lyall said. "The willingness of Sunni soldiers to fight to retake Mosul appears limited." This makes some sense out of the Mosul rout: some Sunni Muslims don't really want to fight other Sunnis in the name of a government that oppresses them.
This suggests a natural limit to ISIS' expansion. Mosul is a mostly Sunni city, but military resistance will be much stiffer in Shia areas. ISIS needs to stick to Sunni land if it doesn't want to overreach.
Iran is fighting on the Iraqi government’s side
The Iranian government is Shia, and it has close ties with the Iraqi government. Much like in Syria, Iran doesn't want Sunni Islamist rebels to topple a friendly Shia government. So in both countries, Iran has gone to war.
Iran has sent about 500 Revolutionary Guards to help Iraq fight ISIS. These aren't just any old Iranian troops. They're Quds Force, the Guards' elite special operations group. The Quds Force is one of the most effective military forces in the Middle East, a far cry from the undisciplined and disorganized Iraqi forces that fled from a much smaller ISIS force in Mosul. One former CIA officer called Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani "the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today." Suleimani, the Wall Street Journal reports, is currently helping the Iraqi government "manage the crisis" in Baghdad.
Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images
These Iranian troops outclass ISIS on the battlefield. According to the Wall Street Journal, combined Iranian-Iraqi forces have already retaken about 85 percent of Tikrit. That alone demonstrates the military significance of Iranian intervention: Iraqi forces have previously floundered in block-to-block city battles with ISIS.
However, Iranian intervention could also help ISIS in its quest to build support among Iraq's Sunnis. The perception that the Iraqi government is far too close to Iran is already a significant grievance among Sunnis. That's part pure sectarianism and part nationalism. Many Iraqis don't like the idea of a foreign power manipulating their government, particularly Iran (memories of the Iran-Iraq war haven't faded).
So Iranian participation in actual combat risks legitimizing ISIS' propaganda line: this isn't a conflict between the central Iraqi government and Islamist rebels, but rather a war between Sunnis and Shias.
The US and Iran are talking about Iraq
The US and Iran have been at odds for decades in the Middle East over issues like the Iranian nuclear program, the second Iraq war, Syria, and Israel. Yet both the United States and Iran want the Iraqi government to beat back ISIS, and the two traditional enemies are meeting to talk about what they can do together.
Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Informal talks between US and Iranian leadership have already begun. The contours of any arrangement aren't yet clear. There's a distinct possibility, though, you end up with a strange situation where the United States sanctions a wider Iranian military intervention in Iraq — despite American troops spending years fighting Iranian-backed militias after the US invasion in 2003.
Whatever agreement comes out of the talks will be both difficult and hugely controversial in both countries. Many American and Iranian strategists see the other as a, if not the, primary enemy in the Middle East. Politically, major factions in both countries despise the idea of cooperating with the other. So any actual policy coordination on Iraq will likely be wary and tense.
Obama might bomb ISIS
The ISIS crisis may be the most devilish foreign policy problem of Barack Obama's presidency, pitting two pillars of his administration's foreign policy against each other: his strategy of using targeted killings to counter violent extremism versus his ironclad commitment to ending Bush's war in Iraq.
Obama has already decided to send up to 275 American troops to Iraq. But the sole purpose of that deployment appears to be evacuating some, but not all, US personnel from the Baghdad embassy. These troops are equipped for combat, but there is not plan for them to fight ISIS or train Iraqi troops (at least, that's been publicly announced).
Multiple reports say the Iraqi government has quietly requested American military aid in the form of drone strikes against ISIS. But because the US has limited intelligence in Iraq, it'll be hard for Obama to start bombing ISIS without expanding America's intelligence and special forces presence there. And Obama really doesn't want to redeploy US troops to Iraq in any significant way.
Tony Avelar/Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images
Indeed, in a press conference on June 13th, he ruled out the deployment of US ground troops. He did leave open the possibility of US airstrikes, and has moved cruise missile destroyers into the Persian Gulf. That said, Obama also set up what might be a very stringent test for any US military involvement:
The United States is not simply going to involve itself in a military action in the absence of a political plan by the Iraqis that gives us some assurance that they're prepared to work together.
If this is is true, then Obama has ruled out the most likely scenario for military action in Iraq: a short-term aerial campaign designed to help the Iraqi military halt ISIS' momentum. Political reform inside Iraq is really complicated, and would involve serious reform from Nuri al-Maliki's Shia sectarian government to accommodate Sunni demands. Putting together a credible political reform plan will take a long time, and certainly won't happen in time for the US to get involved in the immediate fighting.
It's hard to say how strict this criteria is, though. So the question of US militaryinvolvement is still quite open.
Some Americans blame Obama for this
There's also a quickly expanding political debate over whether the Obama administration deserves blame for the chaos. The controversy centers on the 2011 Status of Forces agreement Obama conclude with the Maliki government. The administration tried, and failed, to negotiate provisions that would have allowed the United States to leave a number of troops there.
Win MacNamee/Getty Images
Conservative critics say Obama blame this failure for the current crisis. They say that Obama didn't try very hardto negotiate terms with Maliki. But if he had, they suggested, then US forces could have severely degraded ISIS and prevented this crisis from coming to a head.
"A military presence gives the U.S. leverage to shape political outcomes," Reihan Salam, in one of the clearest articulations of this line of criticism, argues. "The fundamental question is whether even a small contingent of U.S. troops might have reassured members of Iraq's minority communities by shielding them from the worst excesses of a Shia-dominated government, thus undermining those calling for its violent overthrow."
The administration's defenders counter that major factions in the Iraqi government were dead-set on the US leaving zero troops behind. No plausible amount of persuasion, they say, could have convinced key Iraqi players to back a US presence. What's more, they say, it probably doesn't matter. The US couldn't stamp out ISIS even when it had a huge presence in Iraq during the war, so why should anyone believe a small residual force would have mattered?
Iraq's Sunnis will probably suffer the most
In terms of an endgame, experts see ISIS failing to establish an effective rebel government and the Kurds coming out as big winners. Nuri al-Maliki, meanwhile, may lose his Prime Ministership.
Emrah Yorulmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
"The regions [ISIS controls] are not viable entities," Kirk Sowell, a political risk analyst and expert on Iraqi politics, says. "Anbar [an insurgent-contested Sunni province] is totally dependent; over 95 percent of their money comes from Baghdad...Ninevah [another insurgent-contested province containing Mosul] is going to suffer a complete economic collapse."
So "the Sunnis" who live in these provinces and elsewhere "will suffer more from this than anyone," Sowell concludes. Meanwhile, the Kurds will emerge the big winners. The Kurds were on the brink of insolvency due to a dispute with the central Iraqi government over oil exports, but now they've de facto annexed Kirkuk, a major oil city. They can export freely to Turkey and make lots of cash. "This crisis is a lifeline for the Kurds," Sowell says.
As for the Shias, "will suffer but not as much" as the Sunnis, Sowell says. Their leadership will also likely change. "Maliki was having a tough fight in his reelection campaign; it's hard to imagine he has any credibility at all after this complete disaster," he says. "At this point, it's hard to see how Maliki survives this."
http://www.vox.com/cards/things-about-isis-you-need-to-know
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