Nils Henrik/Demotix. All rights reserved.

The United
States looks back on over a year of combat operations against the Islamic
State. The cancer of ISIL, left festering in Syria, metastasised with hideous
speed throughout the Sunni Corridor in Al Anbar province and sped on technicals (pick-up trucks mounting heavy machine guns,
anti-aircraft cannons or recoilless rifles) to take the ancient Arab
city of Mosul, even as the Iraqi units assigned to defend it melted away,
deserting en masse. In
their wake, mass executions, beheadings, rape and despoilment.

Shocked out
of ambivalence with the unexpected fall of Iraq’s second city, President Obama
ordered Operation Inherent Resolve, a coalition of fifteen nations dedicated to
supporting the Iraqi people and military and combating ISIL through the
provision of equipment, training and air support to the Iraqi Army. Operations
began in Iraq on 15 June 2014 and in Syria on 22 September.

The Islamic
State is also celebrating anniversaries. On 26 June they celebrated the one-year
anniversary of the new Caliphate, declared by their leader Al Baghdadi. They
celebrated in style, with bombings and suicide attacks. More importantly,
however, in October they will celebrate ten years of existence as an organisation.
That difference in perception matters: an organisation that has lasted one year
might lack legitimacy; but one that has been around for a decade shows staying
power. Longevity has a value all its own, one that Islamic State propaganda has
been adept at exploiting.

Initial CIA estimates
put ISIL strength at between 20,000 and 31,000 fighters. This was later revised
upwards to 50,000 fighters under the black standards. Russian estimates place
enemy strength at 70,000 while the Kurds—who are perhaps best placed to know—report
up to 200,000 effectives. Though mostly infantry, they were well-armed
with captured weapons, are able to field tanks and artillery, and capable
of purchasing more from the proceeds of their illegal oil sales through black
marketers in Turkey as well as regular taxation of their more than eleven million
subjects.

They have
suffered reverses: Tikrit was lost to them; they were cleared out of pockets in
central Iraq between Baghdad and Samarra; and they fell back before the advance
of the Kurdish Peshmerga near Kobane and Sinjar Mountain. And yet despite 444
days of bombardment and hard fighting against Iraqi and Syrian opponents, the
Islamic State is still capable of launching counterattacks on multiple fronts.

Reasons
for resilience

The Islamic
State benefits from a dispersed model. Local leaders run their territories, or vilayets, with a great deal of
independence. Taxes are collected, services provided, forces are mustered,
attacks are planned within the vilayet.
This dispersion makes it more difficult to paralyse the group with strikes
targeted at a central high command; loss of “senior ISIL leaders” to airstrikes
degrades efficiency but doesn’t impede the operations conducted by the regional
commanders. This also explains the pattern of activity across the wide
territory controlled by ISIL; while the vilayet in Al Anbar might be heavily engaged by Iraqi and
Coalition forces in Ramadi, the vilayets in
Syria are capable of launching offensive operations.

The
recuperative capability of the self-declared caliphate has been underestimated.
The Pentagon estimated in May 2015 that over 12,000 militants and 10,000 fighting
positions had been destroyed by airstrikes alone, not
including combat against Iraqi, Kurdish and Syrian opponents. The “50,000 combatants”
have suffered up to fourty percent casualties, a situation sufficiently grave to
have rendered most armies combat ineffective. The fact that they retain
significant offensive capabilities indicates either that the reports are overstated,
they are able to replace combat losses effectively more than believed, or both.

This points
to intelligence failures on the part of western governments. It seems unlikely
that spy agencies have very many human intelligence sources available within
the Islamic State; while other sources of intelligence have known shortcomings.
This may lead to potentially dangerous conclusions: that the Islamic State is
stretched thin, suffering from high attrition and desertion, facing internal
rebellion, and on its back heel. All of these comfortable beliefs can be
disputed with other evidence:

 The
Islamic State is stretched thin: ISIL controls a territory larger than Belgium and
the Netherlands combined, and it is surrounded by enemies of its own making. It
is logical that it cannot be strong everywhere; but while on the defensive in
Al Anbar and Mosul, the Islamic State is still capable of launching offensives
in various parts of Syria.

They
suffer from high attrition and desertion: Whatever the true rate of
attrition of ISIL forces, the replacement rate appears to be as high. There are
some indications that manpower is an issue for the insurgent group, such as the
recruitment and use of child warriors. On the other hand, this may be part of
an early indoctrination program rather than an indication that they are scraping
the bottom of the barrel. Most states will wait until there is no other choice
before sending their youths into the maw of war for they are “the seed corn of
the nation”: but the soldiers of the so-called Caliphate have proven adept at
defying conventional wisdom and their conceptions of what is just and proper
are very different from our own.

They
face internal rebellion: There is evidence that Sunni tribesmen have
taken up arms to resist the impositions of the Islamic State in the Euphrates
River valley near Deir es Zour. That may be disgruntlement and even some minor
insurgency; but it would be impossible to control a hostile population of eleven million with 50,000 soldiers while at the same time fighting on multiple
fronts. Either ISIL has a much larger force than we believe—one sufficient to
detail units to garrison hostile cities and repress insurgencies—or else the
insurgencies themselves are extremely minor. It is my belief that ISIL enjoys a
much higher degree of support than we would like to believe.

ISIL is
on its back heel: That may be true in certain locations, but it does
not appear to be a fair assessment overall. In fact, ISIL may be closer to
victory than ever.

The evolution
of a Sunni caliphate

Whatever the
estimates of strength, it is nevertheless clear that ISIL does not have the
capability to win a military victory over its enemies. They will not, by force
of arms alone, conquer the Levant. Wars are not won only by firepower; as Sun
Tzu lays out in his Art of War,
it is better to defeat the enemy general than to defeat the enemy army and best
of all is to defeat the enemy king. ISIL can win by undermining its enemies’
morale, by dissipating their will to continue the struggle, by being the last
man standing. And its extremist theology might make it the best-prepared
combatant in this sense.

The Caliphate could potentially draw from a recruiting pool that includes every Sunni Muslim in the world. 

The Islamic
State is surrounded by enemies, true enough. Not even Hitler alienated every
government in Europe; he had his Quislings here and there. Al Baghdadi has
accomplished that difficult feat of being hated by every government around him;
whether he is also hated by their populations is another matter. But while the
Islamic State is weak and surrounded, his enemies are even weaker, or else
severely constrained:

 His
principle opponents, the governments of Iraq and Syria are highly unstable or
already in civil war. Iraq is essentially the Shia south and the Kurdish north,
with a few loyal Sunnis in the centre. They remain divided and highly
suspicious of one another even as the Iraqi government finds itself forced to
rely on the Shia Hashed and Kurdish Peshmerga forces to bolster the regular
army. This only serves to further alienate its Sunni population, who see the
Islamic State as potentially the lesser of two evils. Syria is, of
course, in even worse shape after three years of civil war, with hundreds of
thousands dead and millions displaced.

 Lebanon and
Jordan are too weak to intervene militarily; they struggle even to deal with
the millions of refugees already in their territory. Lebanon is, furthermore,
as internally divided and sectarian as Syria.

 Iran is a
mortal enemy of the Islamic State and has significant ground forces to use
against the black-clad militants. The Islamic Republic is constrained, however:
any large-scale, open movement of troops into Iraq is likely to provoke a
tremendous backlash from the rest of the Middle East, who will view it as a Shia
Persian invasion of Sunni Arab lands. They will—rightly—wonder if Iran has any
intention of leaving after defeating ISIL.

 Turkey is
less of a mortal enemy and has the largest and most professional military next
to that of Israel. The Turks too face a similar constraint: Syria and Iraq used
to be part of the Ottoman Empire and the Turks were not gentle with the Arabs
during the latter’s uprising in the First World War. There are bitter memories
still of that fighting. Furthermore, the Turkish Army fears the Kurds more than
the Islamic State, which is why the Turkish contribution to Operation Inherent
Resolve has been to bomb our Syrian Kurdish allies.

 Israel is
the preeminent military power in the region, but it goes without saying that
the IDF is not going to get involved beyond a few airstrikes in the Syrian
Golan. Having the Jewish State enter the fray against the Caliphate would be a
God-sent propaganda victory of the greatest magnitude;

 Saudi
Arabia is the only other significant Sunni Arab military power. Their money is
what has kept the insurgency against Al Assad alive all this time. However, the
Saudi army has no experience in power projection, notwithstanding their
incursion into Yemen, which is right next door. Furthermore, precisely because
there are Shia in Yemen, in Bahrain and in their own country, the paranoid
House of Saud is unlikely to send units internationally when they might be needed
domestically.

The weakness
of their enemies is one of the greatest assets the Islamic State enjoys.

Rather than
defeating them, a better outcome for Al Baghdadi’s followers would be to
convert their enemies, adding the strength of their opponents to their own.
Again, ISIL is uniquely situated to achieve this goal. Their opponents are
narrowly defined as Kurds, Iraqis, Shia, Alawites, etc. and this limits the
amount of identification there can be between them. But the Islamic State has
declared itself the Caliphate, and under that banner they are perfectly capable
of absorbing groups from many nations. The Kurdish Peshmerga cannot go out and
attract people to become Kurds, nor can the Saudis convince people to fight for
them through the force of Saudi nationalism; but the Caliphate could
potentially draw from a recruiting pool that includes every Sunni Muslim in the
world. That is a big pool.

Khaled Alsabbah/Demotix. All rights reserved.

In practical
terms, ISIL’s maximum borders and manpower pool are the Arab states and North
Africa, but that is big enough as a nightmare scenario. The Islamic Caliphate,
as ISIL interprets it, cannot include Shia Persia (except through conquest) and
Turkey remains secular enough and Turkish enough to resist incorporation:
thanks to Ataturk, not to Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk also
did us the favour of abolishing the last Caliphate on 3 March 1924, by vote of
the National Assembly of the new Turkish Republic to depose Ottoman Crown
Prince Abdul Mejid II. (In fact, Abdul Mejid II might not even count as a true
Caliph, as the Turkish National Assembly was not an Islamic assembly and
therefore had no right to grant the title Caliph to anyone. That would make
Mehmet VI the last Caliph.)

The Islamic
State has three means to re-establish
the legitimacy of the Caliphate, the supreme political and religious organisation
of Islam to which all Muslims owe fealty:

1. By
proclamation of the existing Caliph (which has historically led to the
establishment of family dynasties in the role);

2. By
proclamation of a sufficiently large number of “decision makers,” i.e. the
recognised religious and community leaders of the Islamic world. This is how
the earliest Caliphs were elected, the direct successors of Mohammed;

3. By right
of military conquest. This is the least desirable method, but it nevertheless
confers legitimacy. Many new dynasties have won the Caliphate by defeating the
old entrenched powers, so there is plenty of historical precedence.

The last
Caliph is dead and there is little chance of Al Baghdadi’s extreme form of
Salafist Islam receiving the blessing of the majority of the ummah, so he must establish it
militarily and defend it. Any objective observer must admit that they have
succeeded so far: they have an army and a territory of 11 million inhabitants
to whom they provide basic public services and from whom they collect taxes.
That is the definition of a state, at its most basic level.

The capture of the Syrian capital would be an incalculable propaganda coup for the al-Baghdadi. 

The true
danger lies in the possibility of more Sunni Muslims becoming convinced that
the Caliphate is legitimate. The longer ISIL can defend its current territory,
the greater the legitimacy of its claim. But defending territory is unlikely to
cause a massive shift in public opinion. What Al Baghdadi needs is a catalyst,
a victory to show the Arabs that he truly has God’s favour. And the greatest
symbol of such favour lies at hand: Damascus.

The ancient city was the capital
of the first Umayyad Caliphate when the Arabs overran the Eastern Roman and
Sassanid Empires in the seventh century. Its symbolic importance should
not be underestimated: it was the capture of Damascus that allowed King Hussein
bin Ali to claim the title of Caliph after the First World War, though he lost
it when he was defeated by Ibn Saud in 1925. All the other great cities of
Islam are out of ISIL’s reach: Baghdad, Istanbul, Mecca and Cairo. (Baghdad was
the capital of the second Caliphate, the Abbasid; Istanbul—Constantinople—was
the capital of the Ottoman Caliphate for centuries; Mecca is the holiest city
in Islam; and Cairo was the capital of the Ayyubid Caliphate. The preceding
Fatimid Caliphate was Shia and therefore heretical in the eyes of the Islamic
State.)

The capture of the Syrian capital would be an
incalculable propaganda coup for the al-Baghdadi. The sight of the Black Standard over the walls
of Damascus and on the Great Mosque might prove to be a sign of divine favour
to the Muslim faithful. How many additional recruits would the Islamic State
receive, both in their own territory and through the adhesion of new vilayets such as the dangerous
franchises they already have in Libya, Sinai, Yemen and other regions? The
capture of Damascus might be sufficient to cause a reconciliation between ISIL
and Al Qaeda, its parent organisation. That would be a very dangerous alliance.

It could even
cause a major doctrinal shift in Islam. The Islamic State’s theology is a
radical form of Salafism. While almost all Muslim scholars reject so extreme an
interpretation of Quranic teachings as deviant and mistaken, there is no
guarantee that they will necessarily continue to feel that way. Victory in
battle tends to change men’s minds. The “accepted” form of Islam that is
closest to the Islamic State’s Salafism is the Wahhabism
of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia: birthplace of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In
fact, by far the largest
contingent of foreign fighters in ISIL’s ranks is composed of Saudi
nationals, up to 7,000 of them.

The fall of
Damascus might cause the Wahhabis to reconsider their opposition to the Islamic
State. It would not be an unbelievable leap:

 Saudi
Arabia already has a domestic problem with Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula
(AQAP). If ISIL and Al Qaeda reconcile, the Saudis would face a significantly
enhanced threat.

 The Saudis
feel increasingly besieged by Shia rivals in Iran, Syria, southern Iraq, and on
the Arabian Peninsula itself, which is why they have intervened in Yemen.

 The drop in
the price of crude oil as well as their major international commitments have
strained the abundant Saudi treasury. This will only increase their sense of
desperation.

 The Saudis
also feel abandoned by their fickle American allies, who seem more intent on
making a deal with the hated Persians than in supporting Arabian interests. The
fact that the Senate has approved the Iran Nuclear Agreement will only
intensify these feelings. The biggest beneficiary of the deal might not be
Iran, but the Islamic State, as sectarian violence and hatred is likely to
increase in the near future.

An alliance
between these two extreme forms of Sunni Islam—with or without the acquiescence
of the House of Saud—would fundamentally alter the geopolitical reality of the
world. ISIS would control the core of Islam, including Mecca and Medina, and
the largest oil reserves in the world. The small Arab states would quickly join
or be conquered: Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, the Emirates and Oman. That would be
the nightmare scenario: the Islamic State triumphant not as a military
force, but as the dominant theology in the Sunni Arab world. There would
be no military solution at that point. What western nation, or combination of western
nations, would be willing to invade and occupy so vast a territory? Imagine the
American experience in Iraq increased by several orders of magnitude.

How close is
the Islamic State to capturing Damascus? They are at the very outskirts of the
city. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights reported
that street battles were being fought in the Asali neighbourhood of the
southern Qadam district. That is still a long way from victory: Damascus is a
big city, Assad’s regime has large forces garrisoning it, and street fighting
is brutal, grinding, tedious combat. Yet a collapse could come quickly and
unexpectedly. The most reliable of Assad’s troops are Alawites, whose homes and
families lie to the northwest on the coastal strip between Latakia and Tartus.
Their willingness to fight to the last bullet and last man for the capital is
open to question, if that meant leaving their homes and families exposed to the
vengeance of other rebel groups. They might very well vote with their feet and
go home to defend the mountain passes.

Into that
power vacuum could speed the Islamic state, long before the United States could
determine what was happening, much less take decisive action. US decision-making
is complicated by the fact that we are actively calling for the removal of
Bashar al-Assad; to then use force to help him keep his capital would be highly
ironic and a very difficult political decision to make.

If I were al
Baghdadi, I’d be sending every available man and weapon into the fight for
Damascus. ISIL might be closer than ever to give the Caliphate a real capital
city and having his jihad set
the world on fire.