U.S.-led Airstrikes Disrupt Islamic State, But Extremists Hold Territory
Nour Malas, Dion Nissenbaum and Maria Abi-Habib\
Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2014
U.S.-led airstrikes designed to serve notice on Islamist extremists in Iraq and Syria have also delivered a sobering message to Washington and its allies: Breaking the militants’ grip will be every bit as difficult as they feared.
As the U.S. prepares to launch a ground war by proxy forces in Syria and Iraq, there are signs that the air campaign is disrupting militant group Islamic State. Fighters are fleeing their bases, they travel at night and in smaller units and are cutting back on cellphone and radio communications to evade detection, according to U.S. officials and opponents of the group on the ground.
However, Islamic State appears to have largely withstood the airstrikes so far and with scant pressure on the ground in Iraq and Syria, the militants have given up little of the territory they captured before the campaign began.
“The strikes are useless so far,” said Mohammad Hassan, an activist in eastern Syria battling the regime of Bashar al-Assad. “Most of the training camps and the bases were empty when the coalition hit them.”
Islamic State fighters have reacted swiftly to the threat of airstrikes over the past weeks, moving out of captured military bases and government buildings in Syria, relocating weapons and hostages, and abandoning training camps, according to residents and rebels in the areas the militants control. In Syria and Iraq, they took down many of their trademark black flags, and camouflaged armed pickup trucks. They also took cover among civilians.
They also have maintained much of their financing and recruiting capability and continued to crack down on local populations, anti-regime activists and rebels in Syria said. At the same time, they publicized a series of beheadings of Western hostages.
In addition to holding territory after they came under attack, they pressed on with an ambitious offensive on the Syrian city of Ayn al-Arab, also known as Kobani, close to the border with Turkey.
Analysts said the U.S. is having a hard time getting intelligence to act on, and, as a result, a fraction of sorties flown have resulted in bombings. However, U.S. officials disputed that notion.
“We still have no shortage of targets,” said a senior defense official.
All indications are that the upcoming job on the ground will be complex. The U.S. must arm and advise the Iraqi military as well as forces from Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region, who view each other with suspicion. The Americans will also have to work with Sunni tribes in parts of Iraq controlled by Islamic State.
In Syria, the U.S. will have to train and arm thousands of anti-regime rebels to eventually challenge Islamic State fighters there. They will also selectively aid loosely organized forces in Iraq and Syria, some of whom are linked to groups considered terrorists by the U.S. and Turkey.
The challenge, in some ways, is more daunting than what the U.S. faced previously in Iraq or in Afghanistan. This time, the U.S. has to work with a broader patchwork of often competing, non-state forces who may be looking to use American military power to their own advantage.
Since strikes began in Syria two weeks ago, U.S. defense and Arab officials said they have seen a shift in Islamic State’s tactics. The U.S. has been tracking movements of the militants with drones and other surveillance craft and has seen the fighters operating in smaller groups than before the strikes began.
Smoke billows from the al-Hara hill in Syria, the result of the fighting between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s army and Syrian rebels. U.S.-backed rebels are expected to ask the U.S. to provide close-air support for Free Syrian Army ground forces fighting the militants. EPA
U.S. officials caution that the response by Islamic State differs by area, and said local fighters don’t appear to be directly controlled by the group’s central leadership. One reason is that the U.S. believes it has forced the group to change the way it commands its forces.
Since strikes began in Syria, the militants are using cellphones and radios far less, and have been trying to communicate in ways fighters hope will be less easily intercepted, a U.S. official said.
U.S. officials said the group is also trying to keep their Humvees and tanks out of the coalition’s sights. The militants are now covering vehicles with netting, positioning them under bridges and moving their convoys and other vehicle operations to nighttime.
While the U.S. expects Islamic State militants to eventually find ways to more effectively hide their movements, officials said the early attempts at avoiding airstrikes failed. They noted that the Americans long ago perfected night-vision technology.
As of Friday, the U.S. and its allies had conducted 250 airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Iraq and 80 in Syria, according to the U.S. military’s Central Command, which is in charge of U.S. forces in the Middle East. They have struck more than 300 vehicles and tanks, more than 60 mortar and fighting positions, more than 75 checkpoints, buildings and guard posts, 16 modular oil refineries and dozens of training camps and other facilities.
Syrian anti-Assad activists and members of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army said the U.S. is overestimating the impact it has had on Islamic State. Some residents living in areas controlled by the group in Syria maintain that the air campaign has had little effect.
Militants began moving weaponry and leadership away from their bases immediately after the U.S. announced in September it would strike targets in Syria, activists and rebels said. By mid-September, residents of Raqqa—Islamic State’s de facto capital in northeastern Syria—said the city was emptied of the group’s senior leadership.
“We used to see commanders around the city. But since the announcement [that airstrikes would begin], they’re gone,” said one Raqqa resident.
However, an official from one U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf defended the success of the strikes so far, saying they had slowed the militants’ advance in both countries and was slowly degrading their financing infrastructure.
“ISIS will have a big problem when winter starts,” said one aid worker who provides relief in the eastern province of Deir Ezzour.
“They gained some popularity by distributing [a monthly stipend] of gas to the population and lowering prices. They won’t be able to do that.”
An Islamic State member interviewed via Skype said strikes by the Syrian regime have been more damaging than the U.S.-led assaults, and claimed the group’s production and refining of oil—a major revenue source—continues.
“The airstrikes have been lamer than expected,” he said.
In the city of Raqqa, Islamic State fighters have kept a much lower profile since the strikes began. Some are wearing civilian clothes to blend in, and no longer roam the streets with their pickup trucks and tanks. They have also eased up on enforcement of their strict interpretation of Islamic law, another resident said.
“If they catch someone smoking, they no longer reprimand him,” said the resident. “It’s not a priority now to pursue these things.”
U.S. defense analysts have raised questions about the effectiveness of the strikes on the group, also known as ISIS.
In Iraq, Islamic State hasn’t made any significant territorial gains, but it has held the land under its control. On Thursday, the group advanced into a small town in Anbar province. It was the first major advance in recent weeks in that province, which has been mostly under the insurgents’ hands since the start of the year.
The insurgents took Hit, a town northwest of the provincial capital Ramadi, according to local residents and officials.
Christopher Harmer, a defense analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, said the U.S. is having a hard time getting actionable intelligence. As a result, he estimated only about 10% of the sorties being flown by the U.S. and its partners have dropped bombs.
“ISIS is not really structured in such a way as to be vulnerable to airstrikes,” he said. “They don’t have a lot of static targets. We can bomb a building here, a building there, a tank here, a truck there. But ISIS fighters are very good at intermingling with the civilian population.”
U.S. officials have said the strikes have had a high degree of accuracy.
One U.K. defense expert said that the coalition so far has struck mostly static targets, when the better way to hamper the group’s mobility is attacking fighters moving from one area to another.
“What air power can do is cut down on that mobility,” said Michael Clarke, the director at the Royal United Services Institute, an independent think tank on defense and security. “But it’s not evident at the moment that the coalition of air power has succeeded in doing that.”
In the coming week, U.S.-backed Syrian rebels are expected to meet in the Middle East with Retired Marine Gen. John Allen, the Obama administration’s special envoy in the fight against Islamic State. Gen. Allen is traveling through the region to begin plotting the ground war.
The rebels are expected to ask the U.S. envoy to start providing close-air support—battlefield cover—for Free Syrian Army ground forces fighting the militants.The U.S. is unlikely to agree, however, because American strategists hold sharply different views of the airstrike objectives in Iraq and Syria.
In Iraq, the air campaign is meant to help Iraqi forces beat back Islamic State fighters controlling key parts of the country. In Syria, by contrast, the airstrikes are meant to rattle Islamic State sanctuaries and disrupt their offensive in neighboring Iraq, U.S. officials said. They aren’t designed to force the group from its strongholds.
“We’re not trying to take ground away from them [in Syria]. We’re trying to take capability away from them,” said another U.S. official.
The Obama administration, which has vowed not to send U.S. forces into ground combat, is describing the effort in open-ended terms.
Gen. Allen said it could take a year for Iraqi forces to retake Mosul from Islamic State forces who seized the northern city in June.
“This is going to require a lot of time and patience,” Vice President Joe Biden said Friday, adding that strife across the region “will take a generation or more to work itself out.”
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