The campaign against the self-declared Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is within reach of success — if that is defined by shrinking Isis territory and recapturing its urban strongholds.
A US-backed Iraqi force has retaken most of Mosul, the northern Iraqi city whose capture by jihadi blackshirts in June 2014 jolted a complacent world to attention. Raqqa, the Isis capital in north-east Syria, is encircled on three sides (the fourth is the river Euphrates) by US-backed Kurdish fighters. Turkey and the so-called Free Syrian Army in February took the Isis-held city of al-Bab further west in order to prevent the Syrian Kurds linking up their conquered territories.
The provisional prognosis is that Isis will fall back from its proto-state into a regional insurgency and international terror network. And that as this happens a free-for-all is likely between the competing actors in this tragedy, scrambling for territory in perpetual geopolitical collision, even when notionally on the same side.
Another way of looking at these ominous developments, in Syria and Iraq and across most of the broader Middle East, is even more alarming. The lead actors are pursuing policies that eliminate almost all middle ground. It is not just that we see here what the lapidary but over-used phrases of WB Yeats described: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” In the Middle East “the centre cannot hold” because too many forces are busily blowing it up.
After almost half a million dead, most of “the middle” in the Syrian rebellion against Bashar al-Assad has been eliminated, and half the population has been displaced or driven out. The minority Assad regime chose to employ sectarian tactics to wage total war against what started as a civic uprising, in which the country’s Sunni majority figured large. That (allied to halfhearted western backers who egged rebels on but, instead of giving them the means to prevail, outsourced support to the Gulf) opened the doors to a double comeback: Isis and al-Qaeda.
The US sees this dizzying conflict almost solely in terms of the war against Isis and its own hostility to Iran — even if the Sunni, especially in Iraq, see American forces as aligned with Iran’s Shia proxies. Russia, whose intervention salvaged the Assad regime, seems to subordinate everything to its comeback as a world and regional power. Turkey is focused on preventing Syria’s Kurds from consolidating a de facto state on its borders, alongside self-ruling Iraqi Kurdistan. Iran is building up powerful militias on the model of Lebanon’s Hizbollah in both Syria and Iraq. How is all this working out on the ground?
Even before Russia and Iran rescued President Assad with their decisive victory in Aleppo last December, Syrian rebels and their families were being corralled in northern Idlib province, scene of last month’s sarin nerve gas attack by the regime. Many surviving rebels have been forced to ally with al-Qaeda. Turkey needs Russia’s blessing to pursue its campaign against Syria’s Kurds, so it has largely abandoned its sponsorship of the rebels, while the Assad regime looks set to crush their remnants in Idlib.
In Iraq, the Iran-backed Shia militia coalition has deployed a big force west of Mosul, notionally to support the Iraqi army and US special forces, but in a power play that is a propaganda gift to the Sunni supremacists of Isis and al-Qaeda. Things are not much better elsewhere.
The strongmen of Egypt and Turkey, presidents Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are busily eliminating their political middle ground and filling the jails. Saudi Arabia, another western ally, allows only the ideology of Wahhabi Islam and never had a middle ground. Israel, for its part, has swung to the far right and continues to colonise the ground on which a viable Palestinian state might be built.
Despite all this, the seductive old model of strongmen as guarantors of stability in the Middle East is making a comeback. In Washington and some European capitals, as well as, of course, in Moscow and Beijing, Mr Assad, who has set the highest bar in liquidating middle ground, is seen by some as the least bad option — even after the latest sarin attack and US president Donald Trump’s gesture of military response.
Yet inside the Assad rump state, power has leached to racketeers, bandits and local warlords. “We don’t know who’s in charge any longer, or whether Bashar really has any power,” says a prominent Christian in Latakia, the regime’s coastal enclave. He does not see common ground even inside the regime’s castle walls. After six years of pitiless war that largely passed this haven by, things are crumbling. “For the first time I’ve started feeling we could be on the brink of disaster.”
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