By Robin Wright
In April, President Trump vowed to bring American troops home from Syria. “I want to get out,” he said during a press conference. The United States had spent trillions of dollars in the Middle East over the past seventeen years, he complained. “We get nothing—nothing out of it.” He called it “a horrible thing.” The United States had been “very successful against isis,” he said, “but sometimes it’s time to come back home.” By then, ninety-five per cent of the isis pseudo-caliphate in Syria and Iraq—once the size of Indiana—had been liberated. U.S. officials claimed that tens of thousands of isis fighters had been killed; a residual force, no more than three thousand strong, was isolated in two small pockets of Syria near the Iraqi border. The goal was to get the two thousand U.S. troops, pivotal in providing strategy and intelligence to the Syrian rebels fighting isis, out in the early fall.
No longer. isis is now making a comeback. The frequency of the group’s attacks is up, and so, apparently, are its numbers. It excels, once again, at crafting small explosive devices, and weaponizing drones. And its sophisticated media outreach is recovering, according to a new U.N. report. The elusive isis emir, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whom Russia claimed to have killed in a May, 2017, air strike, reëmerged this month with an hour-long broadcast, his first in a year. He acknowledged that his followers had been tested with “fear and hunger.”
The United States had boasted of its “so-called victory in expelling the state from the cities and countryside in Iraq and Syria,” Baghdadi, who was held by U.S. forces in Iraq for several months in 2004, said. He urged a different metric. “The land of Allah is wide and the tides of war change,” he said. “For the believer mujahideen, the scale of victory or defeat is not tied to a city or town being stolen or subject to those who have aerial superiority, or intercontinental missiles or smart bombs.” He referred to the revival of an earlier version of isisafter it was decimated by U.S. troops in Iraq during the surge of 2007. At the time, the jihadi group was down to only a thousand fighters. isis subsequently mobilized more than sixty thousand fighters from more than a hundred countries to its cause. Baghdadi vowed that those who “patiently persevere” would again have “glad tidings.”
isis may already have numbers sufficient to rebuild. Two stunning reports this month—by the United Nations and Trump’s own Defense Department—both contradict earlier U.S. claims that most isis fighters had been eliminated. The Sunni jihadi movement still has between twenty thousand and thirty thousand members on the loose in Iraq and Syria, including “thousands of active foreign terrorist fighters,” the U.N. said, despite the fall of its nominal capital, Raqqa, last October. The Pentagon report is more alarming: isis has fourteen thousand fighters—not just members—in Syria, with up to seventeen thousand in Iraq. More important, isis has successfully morphed from a proto-state into a “covert global network, with a weakened yet enduring core” in Iraq and Syria, with regional affiliates in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, the U.N. reports. It can “easily” obtain arms in areas with weak governance; it is now a threat to U.N. member states on five continents.
So the Trump Administration has reversed course; it is now keeping U.S. troops in Syria indefinitely. “We’re remaining in Syria,” Brett McGurk, the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter isis, told reporters on August 17th. “The focus is the enduring defeat of isis. We still have not launched the final phase to defeat the physical caliphate. That is actually being prepared now, and that will come at a time of our choosing, but it is coming.” (isis fighters are holed up in the Middle Euphrates Valley, including around the small city of Hajin.) U.S. troops will also need to train local forces to hold the ground so isis cannot return, McGurk said. “So this mission is ongoing.”
The third and final phase of the U.S.-orchestrated campaign against isis is expected to take several months, a U.S. official told me. The goal is for the Syrian Democratic Forces, backed by U.S. airpower, to liberate about four hundred square miles in northeast Syria along the Iraqi border. (The United States has already launched almost thirty thousand air strikes on isis targets in Syria and Iraq, at a cost of more than thirteen million dollars a day.) But U.S. officials acknowledge that that alone will not eliminate isis. It is also active in other areas south of the Euphrates River and near the city of Palmyra, which is under the control of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its allies—where the U.S. does not have a presence.
The U.S. intelligence community is deeply divided, however, over the scope of the isis threat—and even the numbers put out in the Pentagon report. One issue is how to count isis: by fighters on the battlefront, or anyone who has worked in some capacity for the Islamic State’s caliphate or is sympathetic to it? Other agencies, including the C.I.A., have offered estimates that conflict with the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.), a U.S. official told me. “There’s a very big discrepancy.”
Even top military officials have cast doubt on the Pentagon report, which was assembled by the Inspector General based on D.I.A. reporting. “I don’t have high confidence in those particular numbers,” General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week. “Over the last two and a half years, isis has lost about ninety-eight per cent of the ground that they’ve held. They’ve lost significant access to resources, and the flow of foreign fighters has been significantly reduced. Those are all quantifiable, and we know that.”
The numbers game echoes the problem the U.S. faced during the Vietnam War—namely, what constitutes an effective strategy, a military victory, or even a fighter. According to an article by the Soufan Center, which was founded by Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. terrorism specialist, “From at least 2014, estimates of the group’s strength have varied greatly, with the coalition against the Islamic State having somehow reportedly killed 100% of the group’s estimated members several times.” The center suggests “the only clear conclusion from the lack of clarity is that IS was and remains likely much larger than many had reported” and remains “among the most powerful terrorist groups in history, with no shortage of weapons or willing recruits.”
The danger of using either numbers or territory as a barometer is evident in Iraq. In December, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory over isis. “Our forces fully control the Iraqi-Syrian border, and thus we can announce the end of the war against Daesh,” al-Abadi said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “Our battle was with the enemy that wanted to kill our civilization, but we have won with our unity and determination.”
Since then, however, isis has made a comeback in Iraq as well. Cells of isisfighters have launched a wave of attacks this summer in western and central Iraq. On Wednesday, isis claimed responsibility for a suicide car bombing on a checkpoint in al-Qaim, about twenty miles from the Syrian border. It was manned by the Iraqi Army and the Shiite-dominated Popular Mobilization Forces (P.M.F.) security forces. Seven people were killed. The United States still has around five thousand troops advising and training the reconfigured Iraqi Army, which disintegrated when isis blitzed through a third of Iraq in 2014 to create its caliphate. “The Iraqi military and the P.M.F. are the daytime armies,” Michael Knights, an expert on extremism who spent six years in Iraq and is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. “They can’t go out at night and do ambushes. They don’t have the overhead surveillance. They can’t do what we do.” As a result, isis has free rein in areas north of Baghdad, including the rural outskirts of Kirkuk, Diyala Province, and in western Anbar Province.
isis is now using its playbook from 2012 and 2013 to target police chiefs, tribal leaders, and mukhtars (village elders). “On average, between three and four mukhtars are killed or injured every week,” Knights told me. “Project that out over time: in a year, a hundred and sixty villages will have had the most important person murdered by isis. The Iraqi government and General Mattis can tell you Iraq is liberated, but if isis can walk into your village and kill the most important person, have you really liberated it?” Knights added that “the qualitative attack is a more important indicator of isis’s strength than numbers of fighters. You can kill one man with one bullet, but you’ve intimidated two thousand. That’s how isis did it last time. In 2014, the Iraqi Security Forces failed to protect villages. So people were forced to either join isis or get out of their way.”
The U.S. has three missions to complete before it can withdraw. “One, we have to destroy isis. The President’s been very clear that isis is to be taken out,” Secretary of Defense James Mattis said at a Pentagon press conference on August 28th. “We also have to have trained local troops who can take over. We’re doing that training as we speak.” The United States wants to leave behind a force of some fifty thousand in the Syria Defense Forces. “What’s really important,” General Dunford said, “is training the security forces necessary to stabilize those areas that have already been cleared of isis, and that is going to take some time to do that.” The Trump Administration also does not want to withdraw U.S. troops, Mattis said, until a peace process is under way to end the war in Syria and map the country’s political future.
With pivotal support from Russian airpower, Iranian advisers, Lebanese Hezbollah forces, and foreign fighters from Afghanistan and Pakistan, Assad has—for now—secured his grip on power, even though the seven-year civil war still rages around northern Idlib Province. Meanwhile, two peace processes—linked in principle but rivals in practice—have tried to negotiate a political solution. Since 2012, the United Nations has led U.S.-backed talks, mainly in Geneva, involving the Assad government and its political opposition. They have, so far, gone nowhere; the leverage of the opposition, with many of its members based abroad, has been weakened by the collapse of rebel forces inside the country. In 2017, Russia, Iran, and Turkey—which now have diplomatic as well as military sway over Syria’s future—began a separate peace initiative, held mainly in Astana, Kazakhstan.
“We need the Geneva process—the U.N.-recognized process—to start making traction towards solving this war,” Mattis said. “Now, if the locals are able to keep the security, obviously during this time we might be reducing our troops commensurate with their ability to deny isis a return, but it really comes down to finding a way to solve this problem of Assad’s making.”
In other words, there’s still a very long way to go to counter, contain, or eliminate the world’s deadliest terrorist group.
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