The Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham controls thirty-five thousand square miles of land, an area the size of Jordan. The self-proclaimed caliphate stretches from the newly conquered towns along the Syrian-Turkish border, through its de-facto capital of Raqqa, in northern Syria, across the obliterated Iraqi border into Mosul, Tikrit, and Falluja, down to the farming towns south of Baghdad—roughly a third of the territory of both countries. It is exploiting almost every oil and gas field in Syria; it has seized Iraq’s largest refinery, in Baiji, and its biggest dam, north of Mosul, which provides water and electricity for much of the country and could, if destroyed, submerge Baghdad.ISIS funds its operations by selling oil and electricity, emptying captured banks, and extorting money through kidnappings and “taxation.” Its highly skilled army fights with billions of dollars’ worth of stolen American- and Russian-made armored vehicles and heavy weapons. According to Janine Davidson, a former Pentagon official, “ISIS now controls a volume of resources and territory unmatched in the history of extremist organizations.”
Until recently, this astonishing record of conquest failed to win the full attention of the West. The idea of a new Islamic caliphate seemed at the very least far-fetched, and there was a deep American reluctance to know more. Even now, officials can’t agree on its name. ISIS came to power through a civil war in Syria that President Obama had decided to keep out of; as for renewing the American war in Iraq, whose conclusion he regards as one of his main achievements, nothing could be less appealing. There was no clear way to take on these jihadists: targeted drone strikes—the Administration’s preferred tool for countering terrorism—are barely relevant against the Islamic State’s thousands of ground troops. Unlike Al Qaeda—which expelled the ISISfranchise for excessive brutality, last February—the Islamic State hasn’t made its name with spectacular acts of terrorism under the glare of global media. “It’s a state and not a group,” an ISIS press officer named Abu Mosa explained to a documentary filmmaker from Vice News. “We aim to build an Islamic state to cover every aspect of life”—a totalitarian project, but, perhaps, a localized one.
ISIS was easier to ignore than to destroy. As long as it focussed on beheading prisoners of war and imposing its extreme version of Sharia law on subject populations, the threat that it posed seemed limited to anyone who wanted to smoke a cigarette, show her face in public, or worship his chosen god somewhere in the swath of land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Even after the fall of Mosul, in June, and the cleansing of the city’s ancient Christian population, ISIS continued to be underestimated by almost everyone who wasn’t directly in its path. Then, earlier this month, came its assault on the Yazidi religious minority in northwestern Iraq, bearing all the signs of an imminent genocide: the local population driven into the mountains without food or water, captured families divided, men forced to choose between conversion and execution, women taken into slavery. ISIS has done the same to Iraqi Shiites and other supposed infidels, but the plight of the Yazidis was so vivid, so undeniably reminiscent of Srebrenica, that it jolted Washington into action.
“America is coming to help,” the President said on August 7th, four days after the attack. With the consent of the Iraqi government, he ordered U.S. air strikes on ISIS positions besieging Mt. Sinjar and threatening the Kurdish regional capital of Erbil, where thousands of Americans work. Within a week, most of the surviving Yazidis in the mountains had escaped and joined the more than one million internally displaced Iraqis who have been driven into Kurdistan. The C.I.A. began funnelling arms to the Kurdish peshmerga, the only ground troops in the area capable of taking on the Islamic State, and two ISIS-held towns east of Mosul were recaptured. Iraqi and Kurdish forces began coördinating operations, an unprecedented alliance, just weeks after the two sides seemed poised to fight each other. In Baghdad, Iraqi politicians from diverse groups, with support from their backers in Tehran and Riyadh, coalesced behind an alternative to the disastrous incumbent Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, who was forced to step down. The Saudis wrote a five-hundred-million-dollar check to cover the whole of a United Nations humanitarian appeal. Turkey made noises about sealing its border against fighters and arms infiltrating Islamic State territory. European countries promised aid for the refugees and arms for the Kurds.
Suddenly, a common enemy has joined mutually distrustful players in the making of a coalition against ISIS—just the kind of multilateralism that the President favors. As this month’s events bore out, such an effort requires American leadership. Obama said as much in his August 7th speech, but it’s easy to sense his reluctance to get dragged back into the sinkhole of Iraq and the region. The speed with which he declared the Yazidi crisis over—while thousands of people, including those too old or too weak to walk, remain behind on Mt. Sinjar—suggested a desire to move on. Meanwhile, thousands of people from another beleaguered Iraqi minority—Shiite Turkmen—face destruction in the town of Amerli, near Kirkuk, under an ISIS siege. Tribal sheikhs in Anbar are fighting ISIS, and the provincial governor there has asked for American help against the jihadists. The risks of action are obvious; by now, the risks of inaction should be, too.
Armed movements driven by an ideology like that of ISIS are expansionist as well as eliminationist. There is always a new enemy to defeat, a new threat to the dream of purifying the world. The Islamic State, whose success makes it a magnet for jihadists around the globe, has recruited hundreds of suicide bombers, who could carry out operations across the region. Its many hundred fighters holding European or American passports will eventually return home with training, skills, and the arrogance of battlefield victory. It’s hard to believe that the ambitions of ISIS will remain confined to the boundaries of the Tigris and Euphrates.
Only the President can explain to the public why containing and defeating ISISrequires deep, steady, patient engagement. Americans are justly haunted by the mistakes, the deceptions, and the tragedies of the Iraq War. Our toxic domestic politics make it extremely difficult to have an honest debate about this unfolding catastrophe—it’s far easier to assign blame. But fully absorbing the lessons of the past should mean being able to think clearly about going forward: Find partners, internationally and locally, and don’t get out in front of them. Understand the complexity and the importance of politics. Locate the elusive ground between overreacting and underreacting. Pay attention to other people’s nightmares, because they might be contagious. ♦
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