Isis in retreat
Is the terror group finished?
Islamic State once boasted that its swift victories were “a sign of divine assistance”, said Patrick Cockburn in The Independent. By the summer of 2015, against all the odds, it had conquered an area of eastern Syria and western Iraq the size of Great Britain. Since then, “it has suffered nothing but defeats on the ground, and the deaths of senior leaders”. Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria have been retaken. The militant group was recently driven out of Jarablus, its last stronghold on Syria’s Turkish border. Iraqi forces and the Kurdish Peshmerga are closing in on Mosul, its Iraqi capital. Even its Syrian headquarters, Raqqa, may soon be under threat. Last week Isis’s leading propagandist, Abu Mohammed al-adnani, was killed in an air strike. Isis is now “encircled by enemies”: the Syrian and Iraqi armies, Turkey, the US, Russia, the Kurds. The “caliphate” declared in 2014 is “being battered into extinction”.
Adnani was far more than Isis’s spokesman, said Christina Lamb in The Sunday Times. He was the group’s leader in Syria and he ran its external operations – he has links to the Paris and Brussels attacks, and devised its “lone wolf” strategy of encouraging supporters in Europe and the US to kill non-muslims with whatever weapons are at hand. One of the few surviving members of the original group founded by Abu Musab al-zarqawi, then known as al-qa’eda in Iraq, Adnani was regarded as the heir apparent to Isis’s leader Abu Bakr al-baghdadi. His killing will be a major blow, said Martin Chulov in The Guardian. Isis’s upper ranks have been decimated by air strikes in recent months: the group is thought to have lost at least 35,000 of its fighters; the US estimates it has as few as 20,000 left.
Isis’s days as a quasi-state and a major force on the battlefield may be numbered, said Zvi Bar’el in Haaretz (Tel Aviv). But its enemies are “mired in internal conflicts”, and even if Mosul and Raqqa are liberated, Isis will certainly survive as an insurgent organisation. “The emergence of this bloodstained movement was not some atavistic freak of nature,” said David Blair in The Daily Telegraph. “Isis is only a symptom of a deeply rooted political problem, namely the exclusion from power of the Sunni minority in Iraq – and, even worse, of the Sunni majority in Syria.” Mosul and Raqqa are inhabited largely by Sunni Arabs. Neither city will welcome “liberation” by Shias or Kurds. Worst of all would be if Raqqa fell to President Assad’s forces, which are “soaked in Sunni blood”. If the aim is to defeat terrorism in the region, “Isis’s downfall will not be enough”.