Threat of regional conflagration

Islamic State (IS) has been as deadly a proponent of asymmetric warfare as al-Qaeda, with an unrivalled propaganda machine that drew extremists from across the world. Its battlefield capabilities proved greater than any terrorist group has achieved. Yet the demise of the quasi-caliphate, the group set up in Syria and Iraq, is proving every bit as destabilising as its original rise.

Events during the past month have borne out what regional experts long warned: that the single-issue approach to the civil war in Syria — focusing exclusively on eliminating IS, pursued first by former US president Barack Obama and more recently by the administration of President Donald Trump — was at best short-sighted.

Beaten into retreat, IS fighters are now restricted to a few pockets outside urban zones Yet, the past month has been one of the most deadly and dangerous in the war.

Israel attacked Iranian positions and Iranian-backed paramilitaries from the sky; Russian mercenaries encroaching on US-backed Syrian rebels were killed in US air strikes; and the Turkish army pushed further into neighbouring territory in a bid to drive Kurdish militias backed by Washington further from its border.

Meanwhile, President Bashar al-Assad has rained bombs, rockets and mortars on the rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta, a satellite of the capital under government siege since 2013. In a bid to snuff out the resistance there by insurgents, the regime has buried hundreds in rubble, destroyed medical centres and forced civilians to cower in basement bunkers with no electricity or food.

The carnage has been of a more savage intensity even than the siege of Aleppo.

Without a common enemy, rival regional and global powers sucked into the civil war have been trading blows on multiple fronts indirectly and through a bewildering array of proxies. Each clash brings with it the danger of open confrontation as competing interests are brought into irreconcilable relief. London, February 26