Tag Archives: ISIS

07.14.16
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What’s Next For ISIS?

 

 

Going my way?

 

As we talked about last week, ISIS is clearly entering a new phase as they lose territory in the Caliphate. I said that they might transform into a “carnage-based idea”, but of course that is pretty vague, and not really informative. I had meant to bring up this piece in War on the Rocks by Clint Watts, who goes into great detail about the three different types of ISIS affiliates: Statelets (as in Yemen, Libya), Insurgency (like Boko Haram) and Terrorist Organization (Saudi Arabia).

Watts discusses foreign fighters, trained in the caliphate, who will be unable to return to their actual homes after ISIS collapses in Syria and Iraq. They are the ones to watch to see the strength of the movement. “The most indicative data will come from the roughly 15% of Islamic State foreign fighter survivors I estimate will be unable or unwilling to return home. These “floating” fighters lacking roots to a homeland affiliate will be inclined to choose the most promising global affiliates for safe havens.”

I think this is very true. Over the last 25+ years, we’ve seen increasingly-sophisticated foreign fighters find the group that best represents both their ideology, and, more important, the desire for successful jihad. It’s why AQAP was so powerful; it was the most far-reaching and far-sighted AQ affiliate out there. But now we see even AQAP struggling to reach an even newer and less-patient generation, losing fighters to ISIS. As they increasingly clash, though, I’d put my money on AQAP.

And that’s the big question, for me. ISIS was extremely bold in declaring a caliphate, knowing that the aura of success (and their actual battlefield success) would draw in more foreign fighters, and more money. As they begin to lose on that battlefield, will ISIS central still have much control? Will the ISIS brand, to use an awful term, still mean much? That is, when shifting toward affiliate-based statelets and insurgencies, will they still be ISIS in any recongnizeable way, or just groups with a shared heritage but different, more localized goals?

That to me is key. In the same article, Watts mentions how Central Asian fighters might “choose to resettle with an Asian group known for attracting foreign fighters, such as the Khorasan wilayat or possibly more likely the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).” The IMU has been around for a long time. It’s been both a generator and absorber of jihadists. It has long-term and essentially-localized goals. I think that a lot of groups, no matter their worldly ambitions, eventually get settled into what is happening around them. What made ISIS different, even more so than their lust for carnage and media sophistication, is that it pretended otherwise. But even with the spate of attacks, even with the “inspired” killers in cities around the world, they spent far more time fighting  the near enemy.

So then, as they change, as lose that idea of the caliphate, will ISIS really mean anything? Or will they be just a blip? An important one, one that changed the game, for sure. But in the end, will it just be a splintered movement, a period of consolidation followed by fracturing, before the next consolidation? I tend to think so. I think their “affiliates” will be even less affiliated than AQ. That might make whatever they are, in however many forms they are, even more dangerous, though, as everyone will have to up their game to get recruits.

Would be interested to know how I am misreading this, of course.

07.05.16
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Better the Infidel Than The Apostate: Medina Bombings and the ISIS Endgame

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Saudi Press Agency/EPA

It’s been a particularly bloody week in ISIS’s history of violence. Since Tuesday, we’ve seen an attack on Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, a slaughter in Bangladesh that was carried out by radicalized elites, an apocalyptic bombing in Baghdad that was mostly overlooked, and the suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia, including near the Prophet’s Tomb in Medina, Islam’s second-holiest city. As of this writing, ISIS has yet to claim responsibility for the Medina bombings, which means it may not have been an attack planned by ISIS, but rather one “just” inspired by it. However, the wave of bombings throughout Saudi Arabia is indicative of some coordination.

This has led, understandably, to a lot of talk about the next phase of ISIS. Speaking to the CFR last week, John Brennan  “warned that the trajectories for the ISIS religious state, or caliphate, and global violence point in opposite directions. ‘As the pressure mounts on ISIL,” he said, “we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.'” The headline to the Times piece linked above captures most of the analysis: “As ISIS Loses Land, It Gains Ground In Overseas Terror.”

I think this is largely true. There’s no doubt that they are doubling down on large-scale overseas attacks, and are mutating to the point where it is hard to say what ISIS even is: is it caliphate-based and centrally-coordinated like pre-9/11 al-Qaeda, or is it franchised out, like Qaeda starting in the middle of last decade? Or, perhaps more frightening, is it just a particularly carnage-based idea?

I think it is the latter, which is why I think we’re seeing the endgame of what ISIS has been. Note that endgame doesn’t mean the world is particularly close to defeating ISIS, mostly because I don’t think “defeating” is even possible. It’s a generational battle to have the ideology be discredited and to have them stop serving as an inspiration for those who feel that life should be offering more.

Because that is what they do: they offer a sense of greatness in a world that seems to have lost its moorings. This doesn’t mean that they only appeal to the poor and dispossessed; if the last 100 years have taught us anything, it is that the truly scary people are the ones who are comfortable and feel guilty about it, or feel that they shouldn’t be comfortable, but be truly great. Think of the middling student who reads Ayn Rand and begins to believe that his relative failure is due to a conspiracy of the weak. That’s the mindset.

That’s why these attacks, during Ramadan, are so important to ISIS, but also represent their eventual breaking apart. Going after Medina, and attacking largely Muslims (the Bangladesh attack partially notwithstanding) is key to their success. That’s how they attract the truly dispossessed, because they further cut up the world, slicing belief into an ever-narrower portion. It’s exciting to say that, yes, the Turks are Muslims, but bad ones. I mean, Ataturk should pay, symbolically, for being secular. It’s thrilling to say that bombing Baghdad is the blood price that has to be paid for a more just world. It’s radical and dangerous to attack the holy cities. That’s the kind of sick passion that inspires people into being radicalized: the idea that they are the most committed. It makes up for a lifetime of drifting, even if (especially if) that lifetime is only 19 or 20 years. A wasted year or two seems longer to the young, and a certain kind of mindset wants to rectify that through absolute purity.

(It’s important to remember that in many ways the modern radical Islamic movement wasn’t kicked off by the Iranian revolution, which was more concurrent, or even by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but by the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, also in 1979. It’s weirdly a footnote now, but this audacious attack on the corrupt monarchy was inspirational to the future leaders of al-Qaeda.)

Why this represents their eventual breaking apart, though, is the same reason any revolutionary group ends up either coalescing into an actual political entity (Hezbollah) or burning itself out (Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda). The need to up the ante constantly, to keep swimming, means that you’ll alienate more people than you attract. The entire Muslim world seems to be speaking out against the Medina attacks.  The well from which they draw their legitimacy- the well of violence- is the one that will eventually poison them, and they’ll discredit themselves.

It’s a long and uphill battle, and whether through direct coordination or through inspiration, it’s one in which we’re all on the undrafted frontline. As they break apart, and as the slowly lose militarily (and don’t expect progress here to be a straight line), they’ll increase these attacks in an attempt to maintain primacy. It’s no comfort to the dead that this will also be their downfall.

03.28.16
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Palmyra in the Past and Present

 

 

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The “Arab Castle” looms over Palmyra, recently recaptured from ISIS by Asad’s army. Image from CNN.com

I reached Palmyra, those many years ago, after a long trip of minibuses and thumbed rides from belching diesel trucks, conversing minorly in my barely-there Arabic and the unlimited patience of the people who picked me up. The ruins loomed up in the desert, a sun-baked mix of different eras and styles, from distant pagan antiquity to near history, seemingly disconnected from the world, a testament to both the length and the relative insignificance of our history.

Hitchhiking through Syria was neither dangerous nor was it romantic, though I certainly tried to romanticize it. It was a safe time, in the spring of 2000. Hafez al-Asad was still ruling, and while his undertaker pallor still loomed oppressively in thousands of hagiographic portraits, there was a sense of an ending. The oldest son, Basil, who seemed like he was born with a chest full of unearned medals and a dictator’s toothy grin, had been killed in a car wreck a few years before, and the other son, Bashar, was being groomed. He had been living in England- an ophthalmologist, right? – and there was optimism that he would be different. He couldn’t be worse than his brutal old man. Right?

So long ago. The destruction he has levied on his country is enough to make him one of the great criminals of our time. His brutality is compounded by the vacuum it created, the chaos in which (combined with the destruction of Iraq) ISIS found its strength, galloping on blood-stained horses from a medieval nightmare.

Their bloodlust doesn’t need to be recounted here. This is about Palmyra, which was the scene of horror when ISIS took it over. Public mass executions in ancient amphitheaters, the destruction of ancient, pre-Roman temples, the desecration of a shared human heritage. People reacted in horror at the thought of these illiterate goons wantonly destroying ancient ruins. When the Syrian army retook it over the weekend, there was relief that the destruction wasn’t as bad as was feared– though it was still plenty bad, and the murdered would never come back. For many reasons, Palmyra resonated more than the story of 1000 dead.

For many reasons, Palmyra resonated more than the story of 1000 dead. The formulation that I saw was that the theater was the scene of executions, not that executions took place, and it happened to be in an ancient theater. The inflection was on the smearing of a tourist place, a place of antique wonder. This is understandable, if a little grotesque. After all, people die all the time, right?

Yes, of course they do. People die horribly, in mute and screaming terror, in Pakistan or Belgium or Syria or Chicago or Yemen, every day. We’re ripped from this earth by the gory animalism of ideology, whether that is radical fundamentalism or the nihilism of post-capital gang life or rampant jingoism or other ancient horrors. It was always this way- I don’t know the whole history of the Palmyra amphitheater, but through the years, the city, which was taken and retaken, in which different beliefs smashed into each other, was the scene of horror and agony, over and over.

It’s horror that has been dulled by the years, baked into the stones and sanctified by admission. It belonged to people in the past, who didn’t feel pain the same way we do, much how people in other countries don’t weep and moan and bleed and die unless we force ourselves to truly imagine it.

That’s one of the reasons why Palmyra was important. That a goof like 21-yr-old me, with stupid hair and the fake profundity of an adolescent poet, was allowed to go there, in a country that was “supposed” to hate Americans, is why places like that matter. I sat in the old Arab Castle, in solitude, overlooking the ruins, the vast expanse of lives that went into building them, and living in them. It was a castle built for war, that now existed for tourists to connect with the past.

It’s optimistic. ISIS will not last forever. Even Bashar al-Asad will one day fall. This is a generational catastrophe, one that will reverberate for decades, remaking the Middle East. But as the reaction to Palmyra shows- as the existence of Palmyra proves- there is more a sense of shared humanity now than ever. It’s just a matter of overcoming our superstitions and ideologies and small-mindedness, and truly using the empathy of imagination. It’s a matter of recognizing that while we live in the flicker, we don’t have to put out the light just yet.