Embargoed for Release: 16 SEPT 2015 2:30pm
The United States faces
national security challenges in 2015 of a scope and scale that we have not
encountered since the end of the Cold War. The Islamic State in Iraq and
al-Sham (ISIS) has seized control of terrain in Iraq and Syria, declared itself
a caliphate, and aims not only to reify that claim but also to provoke an
apocalyptic war with the West. ISIS is challenging al-Qaeda, the terrorist
organization from which it sprung, as the leader of the global jihadist
movement. Russia, a nuclear power, is waging a crypto-war in Ukraine and is
using its military capabilities to intimidate NATO. The United States and Iran
have signed a nuclear deal that will relieve sanctions in ways that will likely
increase Iran's malign behavior in the Middle East, which already includes the
use of proxy military forces to undermine U.S. allies. China is laying claim to
areas in the South China Sea and is using its increasing military might to
enforce those claims.
The threat to the United
States in 2015 includes not only states and transnational organizations that
have the intent and capability to harm America. The U.S. also faces a threat
from the growing global disorder that its enemies and adversaries are
exploiting. The Islamic State, for example, is pursuing a strategy that both
breaks strong states and preys upon power vacuums in failed states. It has
worked to provoke and expand a Sunni-Shia sectarian war since its origins as
al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2004. That sectarian war is now engulfing the region and
spreading around the world.
Iran is helping to
accelerate and expand sectarian war. The Iranians are supporting the Assad
regime through a comprehensive strategy, including military resources such as
trainers, advisors, and funding. That Alawite regime is deliberately starving
its own people, dropping heinous barrel bombs on civilian targets, torturing
family members of its opponents, and gassing its own people. These are war
crimes committed primarily against Sunni. The perpetuation of the Assad regime
is one of the major accelerants of the radicalization of Sunni as well as Shi'a
populations, and without the Iranians, the regime would not have survived this
long. Tehran has gone so far as to recruit its own people as “volunteers” to
fight in Syria, and has mobilized Shi'a from as far away as Afghanistan to
enter this sectarian battle.
All of these
developments have led to the growth of dangerous power vacuums. The world has
witnessed the collapse of governments and states. Governments changed in
Tunisia and Egypt during the Arab Spring. Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, all
challenged by the Arab Spring, are failed or failing states. The Islamic State,
therefore, has room to grow in the voids where government once was and Iran's
counter-strategy is making the problem much worse.
The Islamic State
announced its intent to "remain and expand" in November 2014. The
slogan, which appeared on the cover of its English language magazine, conveyed
its strategic objectives: to remain in Iraq and Syria and to expand beyond
their borders. My analysts at the Institute for the Study of War assess that
ISIS is operating in three rings: an Interior ring, consisting of Iraq and Syria; a Near Abroad ring in lands that were parts of
historical Caliphates; and a Far Abroad ring in Europe, the United States,
Australia, and Asia. In the Near Abroad, ISIS has active governorates, or
wilayats, in Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Yemen, the Caucasus,
Algeria, and Nigeria.
The analysts at the
Institute for the Study of War have observed that ISIS has brought signature
capabilities and campaigns from Iraq to Egypt, where it is now pursuing a
campaign against Egyptian Security Forces in the Sinai modeled on the “Soldiers
Harvest” campaign that eroded the Iraqi Security Forces’ capabilities and
control in Mosul, Iraq in late 2013. That historical campaign’s signature
weapon, the House-Borne IED (HBIED), destroyed the houses of Egyptian security
forces in Sinai repeatedly this summer. The United States has seen the impact
of the fall of Mosul, and it should be extremely concerned about a capable
terrorist organization that is trying to thin security forces in
internationally significant terrain, such as the Egypt-Israel border.
The United States must
therefore evaluate its efforts against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in this wider
global context. President Obama, in September 2014, declared his intent to
“degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL,” the
government’s acronym for the Islamic State. The international coalition against
ISIS speaks of its mission slightly more modestly, using the military doctrinal
term defeat (meaning to break the enemy’s will or capability to fight) in lieu
of destroy (meaning physically to render an enemy's combat capability
ineffective until it is reconstituted).
Defeating ISIS is a
correct mission statement for the activities of the United States. It does not
mean U.S. troops must be everywhere that ISIS is, or that military force is the
only instrument that should be used. Rather, defeating ISIS requires using
military force, diplomacy, and all the instruments of U.S. national power to
break the organization’s capability to fight, since the will of an apocalyptic
enemy is not likely to break. Some in policy circles might hope that ISIS could
be contained in Iraq and Syria. But unfortunately, ISIS has already spread
beyond those areas, as I have noted. The opportunity for containing ISIS in
Iraq and Syria has passed. The opportunity to defeat it in Iraq and Syria in
ways that collapse its global reputation and capabilities is fleeting.
The United States is not
succeeding at defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Make no mistake, the United
States and the international coalition have been essential to limiting ISIS’s
expansion and reversing some of its gains. Airstrikes in Iraq have been vital
to helping ground forces retake terrain and degrade ISIS. The U.S. has helped
the Iraqi Security Forces recover some territory that ISIS had seized, such as
the very important gain in Tikrit. ISIS has gained new terrain in Ramadi,
however, and still retains its safehaven in Mosul. This is not surprising. The
U.S. has not provided support to the Iraqi Security Forces in ways sufficient
to render them sufficiently effective against this enemy, such as close air
support.
The problems of the
Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) at this time stem from the government’s lack of a
monopoly on the use of force, an unsurprising consequence of the long delay in
providing any U.S. military support to Iraq and then constraining that support
to levels inadequate to meet the crisis Iraq faced. Iranian-backed proxy forces
thus took the field shortly after the fall of Mosul and have gained influence
from the reliance the Iraqi government must place on them. The
Iranian proxies are
different from the popular mobilization of Shi’a volunteers that have also
taken the field. The popular mobilization has largely remained under the
control of Iraq’s clergy and political parties. But the Iranian-backed groups
have asserted their own command and control. They include Katai’b Hezbollah,
which the United States designated as a terrorist organization, and Asai’b Ahl
al-Haq, the Lebanese Hezbollah-trained militia responsible for kidnapping and
killing five U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2007, among many other American and Iraqi
deaths it has caused.
Since the fall of
Ramadi, the Iranian-backed militias have deliberately chosen campaign
objectives different from those designated by Iraq’s Prime Minister, Haider
al-Abadi, in order to throw Abadi’s strategy off track and take control of the
military situation. They are motivated by the determination they share with
their Iranian masters to drive the U.S. out of Iraq once more and install
pliable Iranian clients—a role in which these groups’ leaders fancy
themselves—permanently in Baghdad. In recent weeks, they have threatened Iraqi
officials in order to ensure that they do not advance the Prime Minister’s
vital and popularly supported reforms. They or another Iranian-backed element
have kidnapped Turkish workers in order to compel Turkey to change its policies
in Syria. And they are increasing violence among Shi'a in vital cities such as
Baghdad and Basra. The Iranian-backed militias are in a showdown with the Prime
Minister, and the future of the government of Iraq and the unity of the country
rely on the Prime Minister winning this very real contest for power.
The U.S. is trying to
counter ISIS as though it is the only enemy on the battlefield, when in fact it
is but one of the terrible actors driving the global sectarian war. A strategy
that tries to empower Iran and help Tehran expand its influence throughout the
region will inevitably fail. It is actually making things worse. Exclusive
focus on the Islamic State has also led the U.S. to ignore the growing threat
of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra.
Jabhat al-Nusra poses a
threat to the United States for several reasons. It is strong, growing, and
effective, and it creates momentum for global al-Qaeda, which is still a real
threat to the United States. It hosts the Khorosan Group, elements of al-Qaeda
core that are plotting to attack the West. It recruits foreign fighters from a
global network who will eventually bring the fight to their home countries. It
also precludes many of the political and military solutions that the United
States seeks. It violently eliminates moderate opposition from the battlefield;
it was the organization that killed, kidnapped, and dispersed the group of
roughly fifty U.S. vetted and trained rebels introduced this summer. It opposes
political transition or working with the West. It is intertwined into courts,
administration, and command structures in rebel-held Syria. Jabhat al-Nusra
embeds itself in existing opposition civilian and military structures and
gradually remakes them in al-Qaeda’s image. It is therefore stealthier, more
intertwined with social and military groups, and harder to defeat than ISIS.
Jabhat al-Nusra uses more patient means than ISIS to achieve its objectives,
but those objectives are no less dangerous: namely an emirate for al-Qaeda in
Syria that is a part of al-Qaeda’s global caliphate.
The United States needs
to recalibrate its policy to the security realities that we face. A strategy
that tries to compartmentalize the ISIS threat from other drivers of regional
and global instability will fail.
The views expressed in
this testimony are those of the author alone and do not necessarily
represent those of the
Institute for the Study of War.
