A complex and vexing conflict

Defeating IS will take more than military might

TURKEY’S downing of a Russian fighter jet on its border with Syria this week had some predicting the Third World War.

Many people feared an escalation of the complicated conflict in the region. Fortunately, another world war is not upon us. Although the Russian government and many of its citizens were outraged by the incident, the resulting battle is more likely to be fought with economic weapons.

Russia has threatened to mothball deals with Turkish firms and curb imports of Turkish goods, as well as Russian tourism into Turkey.

Energy is a key issue, with questions about Russia’s gas exports to Turkey.

Yet the downing of the aircraft, which came after the Turks warned several times that the Russians were violating their airspace, not only reflects longstanding tensions between Russia and Turkey, but highlights more profound and complex divides between global powers over Islamic State (IS) and the conflict in Syria.

Clearly, the incident underlines how simplistic the idea of an international coalition, led by the US, to fight IS can be.

It came just a few days after the United Nations Security Council unanimously called on all states able to do so to join the battle against the jihadi caliphate in Syria and Iraq.

That resolution offered some hope of more concerted action and that the world’s superpowers, and those of the Middle East, were finally lining up to combat the threat, which has radiated out beyond the region with tragic terror attacks in recent weeks in Paris, Beirut and the Sinai. But things are rarely that simple.

The Financial Times this week offered sober comment. It described talk of a grand coalition against IS as “heroically optimistic”, arguing that for a united front to work, everyone had to agree on a common enemy.

The downing of the fighter jet has signalled just how remote that is.

As long as Russia’s priority is to prop up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, that agreement is going to be hard to achieve.

Moscow’s support for Mr Assad is at the core of the difficulty in getting consensus on an anti-IS strategy.

The Turks are certainly on the wrong side of it, given that the Assad regime is persecuting Kurdish rebels they regard as their countrymen.

The US and France are hardly comfortable working with the Assad regime either. And a joint US-Turkey initiative to clear IS from Syrian border towns is looking more complicated now than it did a few weeks ago.

The geopolitical instability in the region must be addressed though, especially given the way in which it is spreading radical, even psychopathic ideologies across the world.

The leverage to tackle that threat rests in Washington and in Moscow. The two have the power to curb what is fast becoming something of a Cold War by proxy.

The UN is powerless to bring about a viable coalition to

As long as Russia’s priority is to prop up the Assad regime, agreement is going to be hard to achieve on an anti-IS strategy

fight IS as long as the two powers, which are on the Security Council, pursue conflicting interests in the region. Only if they find a way out of the stalemate between them will there be the potential for a real coalition, with the ability to take on IS and its backers in a meaningful way.

But even if geopolitical solutions can be found to combat the threat, they can go only so far as long as the underlying causes driving the rise of IS are not attended to.

To the extent that these are about extremist interpretations of Islam, leaders of the faith everywhere need to fight harder against that.

To the extent that the underlying drivers in the socioeconomic conditions of young Muslims in Europe and elsewhere that help to radicalise those youngsters and make them vulnerable to IS’s highly sophisticated recruiting tactics, those conditions too need to be addressed by the governments of those countries.