Isis faces military defeat – but may regroup
ISLAMIC State (IS) is facing military defeat in one of its last strongholds in Mosul as the military coalition, led by the Iraqi government, announces its assault on the western part of the city following its successful defeat of the Islamists in eastern Mosul.
“We announce the start of a new phase in the operation. We are coming to Nineveh to liberate the western side of Mosul,” Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi said on Sunday.
The media reported that Iraqi forces had seized 17 villages from IS as they advanced from several directions towards Mosul airport the same day.
Analysts say it is only a matter of time before the coalition retakes all of Mosul, despite predicting that the final fight will be bloody and difficult as IS puts up fierce resistance, including booby-trapping buildings, launching repeated suicide attacks and embedding among the city’s civilian population, including reports of some residents being used as human shields.
But many questions have been raised as to what the situation on the ground in Mosul will be once IS is defeated. Of even more importance will be the fate of the approximately 750 000 civilians still trapped in west Mosul.
“We are racing against the clock to prepare emergency sites south of Mosul to receive displaced families,” said Lise Grande, the UN’s humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq.
The coalition fighting for Mosul includes Kurdish Pershmerga and Turkomen soldiers – supported by Turkish military advisers, Shia militias and police federal units fighting as part of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMU), and the 15th and 16th division of the Iraqi army supported by the Iraqi air force.
US, British, Canadian and French advisers on the ground are advising the coalition which is also supported by airstrikes carried out by the respective air forces of the adviser group.
The coalition is a volatile mixture, including several countries with competing geopolitical interests and ideologies – reflected in their respective support of various proxy militias, and Sunni and Shia Iraqi soldiers and militia members with a bloody history of sectarian divide.
“Should the Islamic State lose its entire territorial base and revert to its pre-2014 status as an insurgent movement, the consequences would be profound, though much would in fact depend on the circumstances of its downfall, and particularly on the identity of those who deprived it of its status as a state,” argues Mark Heller from Israel’s Institute of National Security Studies (INSS) in a piece about the situation in Syria and Iraq following the defeat of IS.
As long as a sense of Sunni grievance and deprivation persists and IS continues to embody the cause of Sunni deprivations against the Iranian-backed Shia majority in Iraq, and the Iranian and Shia-backed Allawite minority in Syria, IS will continue to enjoy significant support from Sunni constituencies irrespective of its depraved cruelty.
Secondly, Heller points out that despite IS alienating almost everybody, the continued support of foreign actors in the fight against the extremists can’t be taken for granted.
The Gulf monarchies still see Iran as the greater geostrategic threat and are preoccupied with the containment of Iran’s influence in Syria and Iraq (and Yemen), an objective that would hardly be realised by crushing IS.
The Turks, meanwhile, are more concerned with crushing Kurdish aspirations. To that end they are trying to contain Kurdish power in Iraq and Syria which constitutes a major force against IS in those areas.
For the Russians, shoring up Syrian President Bashar al-Asad’s regime is the end game.
This is so even if that comes at the expense of fighting rebel groups that themselves are fighting IS.
Heller further explains that even if IS is completely destroyed in Iraq and Syria, this does not mean the jihadists will be replaced with stable, centralised and authoritative governments.
Both Syria and Iraq bear the scars of high numbers of casualties, brutal conflict and both have heterogeneous populations which will struggle to reconcile or accommodate each other peacefully, irrespective of any imaginable political scenario.
Finally, once IS is defeated militarily, this doesn’t equate with their physical disappearance from the Middle East.
There are strong possibilities that the organisation could regroup and extend its influence to other regions including Libya and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula – ultimately supported there and elsewhere by followers who subscribe to its ideology. – ANA