The fight against the Islamic State appears to be going well. On July 9, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory in Mosul after the city was finally retaken. The same day, the United States and Russia agreed to a cease-fire in southwestern Syria, ostensibly giving government forces and Syrian rebels a freer hand in fighting the Islamic State – not that the rebels have ever fought IS. Then on July 10, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told Reuters that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was dead, as had been rumored a month ago.
Geopolitical Futures states in its article What Really Matters in the Middle East that these are welcome developments for the enemies of the Islamic State, but the fight is far from over.
It took nearly nine months to dislodge IS from Mosul despite the fact that Iraqi security forces significantly outnumbered IS forces and were backed by the United States. (By comparison, it took IS only two weeks to take Mosul.) The difficulties of urban warfare surely account for the length of the battle of Mosul, but only up to a point. The Islamic State simply could not have lasted as long as it did without a fair amount of local support. Losing Mosul is ultimately a symbolic but tolerable defeat. The city Iraq has reclaimed is broken. For the first time in history, a Shiite military force has taken over a majority Sunni city. Its population doesn’t trust the central government any more than it trusts the Iran-backed Shiite militias operating immediately west of the city. And so Iraq’s fundamental problems are unresolved. The Sunnis hate the Shiites, the Shiites hate the Sunnis, and Iraqi Kurds are trying to break away. Iraq’s sectarian conflict will press on, and jihadists will exploit the conflict as they see fit.
Then there are the practical military considerations. So bloodied were Iraqi security forces in the battle of Mosul that they will be in no rush to resume the fight in other IS-controlled areas such as those in Anbar province. The United States will also have to adjust its strategy if it wants to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the creation of the Islamic State in the first place. As the U.S. commander of the operation against IS said, the government will have to do something “pretty significantly different” to keep that from happening.
Meanwhile, Russia and the United States appear to have set aside their differences and have agreed to a cease-fire deal in southwestern Syria. The truth is that Moscow and Washington have been quietly cooperating in Syria for some time. The coordinated offensives of the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Syrian army against IS forces a few weeks ago are a testament to their cooperation – a far more important one than a doomed-to-fail cease-fire. In fact, the agreement is already starting to fray. Al-Masdar news reported Syrian army advances in the countryside near Sweida and Damascus the day after the cease-fire was announced, and yesterday the Free Syrian Army claimed it had shot down a Syrian jet and had retaken land from government forces. Whether or not this is true doesn’t matter; what matters is that they are still fighting.
The death of al-Baghdadi is also less encouraging than it first appears. It’s certainly possible that al-Baghdadi was killed in a Russian airstrike, as the initial reports claimed. It is also irrelevant. Groups like the Islamic State are more hydra than snake: Cutting off the head doesn’t kill the body, it just creates new heads. The United States forced Osama bin Laden into hiding before it killed him in Pakistan, and yet al-Qaida was largely unaffected by his absence. There’s no reason to think this will be any different. That’s because he was playing the long game. Knowing he would probably be a martyr, al-Baghdadi almost certainly empowered lieutenants capable of carrying on after his death. The Islamic State boasts a pretty sophisticated bureaucracy, replete with tax collection, policing activities, and even a public health system.
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Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the Islamic State is not yet defeated. It still holds defensible territory stretching from Deir el-Zour to Abu Kamal. It still conducts terrorist attacks meant to antagonize sectarian groups and to produce new recruits. It still tries to infiltrate surrounding countries, most notably Jordan and Saudi Arabia. (Just yesterday, Jordan thwarted an attempt to cross its border illegally.) And it still has members who, once militarily “defeated,” can blend in to society undetected. As the Islamic State weakens, the regional ethnic and sectarian conflict will worsen.
