A month ago, ISIS’s advance looked unstoppable. Now it’s been stopped.
But you'd be wrong. The truth is that ISIS's momentum is stalled: in both Iraq and Syria, the group is being beaten back at key points. There are initial signs — uncertain, sketchy, but hopeful — that the group is hurting more than you may think, and has stalled out in the war it was for so long winning. ISIS isn't close to being destroyed. But they are reeling.
ISIS's defeats in Iraq are more important than its gains
(Institute for the Study of War)
In mid-October, ISIS advanced to within 16 miles of the Baghdad
airport. Many observers (and many Iraqis), fearing an ISIS assault on
Baghdad itself, understandably panicked. But to Michael Knights, the
Lafer Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the ISIS
advance meant something else."The threat posed to Baghdad this autumn is emerging less because [ISIS] is winning the war in Iraq," he wrote in Politico Magazine, "and more because it might be slowly but steadily losing it."
To understand what Knights means, you have to understand the basic dynamic of the see-saw war between ISIS and the Iraqi government. The war has been bifurcated: while ISIS has been making big inroads in the western, heavily Sunni Anbar province, it's being pushed back in the other major battlefields around the country, including Rabia, a northwest border town linking ISIS's holdings in Iraq and Syria.
"They appear to have hit their limitations"
In late October, ISIS suffered a defeat in an even more crucial area. Iraqi government forces took Jurf al-Sakhar, a town (in the area labeled Northern Babil in the above map) that Knights describes as an ISIS stronghold. This was a real defeat. As Reuters put it, "the victory could allow Iraqi forces to prevent the Sunni insurgents from edging closer to the capital, sever connections to their strongholds in western Anbar province, and stop them infiltrating the mainly Shi'ite Muslim south."
The question, then, is whether ISIS's recent victories in Anbar have been more important than its defeats. That's not obvious. It's also not obvious that its advances in Anbar can be translated into victories elsewhere; the Anbar campaign owes a lot to the tactical acumen of one commander, the Chechen fighter Abu Umar al-Shishani. "You have Shishani running wild in Anbar, employing very different tactics than ISIS is employing in the rest of Iraq and Syria," says Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
The contrast makes ISIS's setbacks outside of Anbar look even more significant. Shishani doesn't control broader ISIS strategy, nor does he seem capable of turning it around even if he did run it. "In terms of their offensive operations, Anbar is going well," Gartenstein-Ross says. "Everywhere else, they appear to have hit their limitations."
ISIS's siege of Kobane has been a disaster
Kurdish fighters in Kobane. (Ahmet Sik/Getty Images)
In Syria, ISIS isn't facing the same kind of concerted
counter-offensive that it is in Iraq. But it's suffering from a
self-inflicted wound: the stupid, counterproductive siege of Kobane, a Kurdish town in Syria on the border with Turkey.For months, ISIS has been trying and failing to take Kobane. Its recent push, beginning on around September 16, looked likely to succeed. But Kurdish fighters, with heavy American support, have pushed ISIS back. Kobane could still fall, but the Kurdish resistance has shattered the perception of ISIS invincibility — a crucial element of its recruiting pitch.
"The [loss of] prestige in the jihadi movement could do a lot of damage to them," Garteinstein-Ross suggests. "ISIS can draw so many recruits because they're seen as the strong horse, because they're winning. [Kobane] shifts that perception."
Moreover, they've thrown a ton of manpower into Kobane. "They may have lost 4,000 fighters trying to take Kobane," Gartenstein-Ross says. He cautions that the 4,000 number is a spitball estimate; the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that about 500 ISIS fighters have died since September 16. But there's been fighting over Kobane since August 2013.
The loss of prestige and of personnel compound one another. The more people ISIS loses, the more it needs new fighters. But the defeats make people less likely to volunteer. ISIS has already been conscripting local Syrians and Iraqis to fill its ranks; they may need to conscript even more to make up for the losses, and the involuntary fighters - some of them children - will likely be less effective than voluntary recruits.
Three reasons the war may soon get even worse for ISIS
An airstrike near Kobane. (Kutluhan Cucel/Getty Images)
There are at least three major causes of ISIS's recent defeats. Each
gives us reason to believe that ISIS may only become more vulnerable as
time goes on.First, while American airstrikes are not going to defeat ISIS, they have seriously limited the group's ability to conduct offensive operations. "Airpower has made it difficult for ISIS to concentrate its forces in large numbers," Jason Lyall, a political scientist at Yale University and an expert on counterinsurgency, writes via email. "It has made it more dangerous to reposition its equipment and forces, slowing down its reaction times and complicating its command and control. As a result, ISIS is a far more dispersed force than it was in June."
The harder it is for ISIS to fight in the open, the harder it is for it to put together troop-intensive drives to conquer territory. If ISIS can't expand, it can only preserve what it has or retract.
Second, ISIS's enemies are adapting. ISIS "is a military power mostly because of the weakness and unpreparedness of its enemies," Knights writes in West Point's Sentinel journal. ISIS's advances depend on its ability to launch lightning-quick strikes against opponents that aren't ready for it. Iraqi and Kurdish forces, with American support, are finally learning how to counter these tactics.
"Airpower alone is insufficient to defeat ISIS"
Third, ISIS's so-called caliphate has hamstrung its military options. "When they declared the caliphate, their legitimacy came to rest on the continuing viability of their state," Gartenstein-Ross writes.
If ISIS didn't have to run the caliphate, its smart strategic move would be to melt into the surrounding populations, wait for Iraqi and Syrian troops to enter the area, and then fight them as an insurgency. But the obligations of running a caliphate means that the fighters need to stay visible and out in the open —leaving them exposed and vulnerable.
But don't count ISIS out yet
Kashmiri demonstrators hold up an ISIS flag during a
demonstration against Israeli military operations in Gaza, in downtown
Srinagar on July 18, 2014. (Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images)
These setbacks are significant, as is the group's slowing momentum.
But to be clear, none of it specifically points to ISIS getting closer
to collapsing. "On balance, ISIS is probably in a stronger position
today than it was" in mid-July, Lyall writes. ISIS has consolidated
control over its core strongholds, such as Mosul in Iraq and Raqaa in
Syria."It would be a mistake to read too much into these local reversals" in Iraq, Lyall writes. "ISIS has proven adaptive, especially in moving its forces around on the battlefield and in coordinating multi-pronged offensives. A temporary setback in one area may only mean that ISIS is repositioning for a wider effort somewhere else."
Things like US air strikes are good for stalling ISIS's advance, but to be clear, they are not going to defeat the group. "Airpower alone is insufficient to defeat ISIS or even degrade it seriously," Lyall cautions. "Instead, its role is to make ISIS work harder to control and extend its territory while buying time for the Iraqi Army."
So it's best to see the recent ISIS setbacks as evidence that ISIS is vulnerable rather than as a harbinger of any looming collapse. The fact that is being rolled back in some areas indicates that the group can be budged, but the group's total defeat is unlikely, absent a collapse in Sunni civilian support and more effective opposition in Syria.
"I don't think these latest losses are things that ISIS is incapable of recovering from," Gartenstein-Ross says. "There are always ebbs and flows in any war, and I expect there to be [ISIS] gains. But overall, they're a weaker organization than they were at the beginning of August."
Watch: Obama's 2014 evolution on ISIS, in under 3 minutes
Myth #9: ISIS is invincible
Reading the news of
ISIS's conquests in Iraq and Syria, and even its recent foray into
Lebanon, you might get the sense that ISIS is unstoppable. That it'll
sweep Iraq, and really, truly, establish an extremist Islamic state in
Iraq and eastern Syria.
This isn't true. ISIS is smarter and more effective than it used to be, and it's too strong to collapse on its own, but it's still quite vulnerable. The Iraqi government, with Kurdish and American help, really could make major inroads against ISIS.
In June, when ISIS was sweeping Iraq, there were panicked predictions that Baghdad was about to fall to ISIS's advance. It didn't. ISIS didn't even try to take the city, likely because it knew it couldn't dislodge the huge concentrations of Iraqi troops there — or hold a majority-Shia city that would never accept it.
Iraqi demographics place a natural limit on ISIS's advance. Even high-end estimates of ISIS's strength — 50,000 troops — make it much smaller than the Iraqi army or Kurdish peshmerga. It'd be impossible for ISIS to take and hold majority Shia areas, where they'd be totally unable to build popular support. The Islamic State's borders in Iraq are limited to northern and western, Arab-majority, Sunni-majority Iraq.
That's a damning problem for ISIS. All of the major oil wells, which provide 95 percent of Iraq's GDP, are in southern Iraq or Kurdish-held territory in the northeast. ISIS can't advance on the Shia south, and a joint US-Kurdish campaign is reversing its gains in Kurdistan. ISIS has huge financial reserves for a militant group — maybe up to $1 billion dollars. But that's a relatively small amount for a government, and any attempt to actually govern northwestern Iraq in the long run would lead to economic disaster.
When you pair the inevitable economic crisis in ISIS-held Iraq with ISIS's brutal legal system, it seems like Sunnis will eventually tire of the group. That discontent may not be enough on its own to end the group's rule, especially if it still believes the Iraqi central government would be worse for them. But it creates an opening for Iraqi Prime Minister-delegate Haider al-Abadi to reach out to disaffected Sunnis. He might be able to make allies among Sunni tribal militias.
Meanwhile, ISIS may alienate some its core Iraqi allies: militias who support a Saddam-style Sunni dictatorship. They're generally secular and no fans of ISIS's vision of Islamic law, and are only allied with it to fight the government. If ISIS's Sunni allies turn against it, and the government does a better job making its rule look attractive, ISIS may lose the Sunni population — and most of its gains in northern Iraq. Again, that's not inevitable, and will require some tough political changes in Baghdad, but the point is that ISIS is far from invincible.
ISIS's hold in Syria, though, would be much, much harder to dislodge. It's hard to imagine either Assad or moderate anti-Assad rebels mounting an effective military campaign against ISIS in the near term. But rolling back ISIS in Iraq, and containing it to Syria, would be a major victory, though an incomplete one as it would leave ISIS with a chunk of Syria. Still, this would limit the group's reach in the Middle East and blunt its global appeal. And when Syria's civil war finally does end, whenever that happens, eliminating ISIS will be the winning side's first priority.
This isn't true. ISIS is smarter and more effective than it used to be, and it's too strong to collapse on its own, but it's still quite vulnerable. The Iraqi government, with Kurdish and American help, really could make major inroads against ISIS.
In June, when ISIS was sweeping Iraq, there were panicked predictions that Baghdad was about to fall to ISIS's advance. It didn't. ISIS didn't even try to take the city, likely because it knew it couldn't dislodge the huge concentrations of Iraqi troops there — or hold a majority-Shia city that would never accept it.
Iraqi demographics place a natural limit on ISIS's advance. Even high-end estimates of ISIS's strength — 50,000 troops — make it much smaller than the Iraqi army or Kurdish peshmerga. It'd be impossible for ISIS to take and hold majority Shia areas, where they'd be totally unable to build popular support. The Islamic State's borders in Iraq are limited to northern and western, Arab-majority, Sunni-majority Iraq.
That's a damning problem for ISIS. All of the major oil wells, which provide 95 percent of Iraq's GDP, are in southern Iraq or Kurdish-held territory in the northeast. ISIS can't advance on the Shia south, and a joint US-Kurdish campaign is reversing its gains in Kurdistan. ISIS has huge financial reserves for a militant group — maybe up to $1 billion dollars. But that's a relatively small amount for a government, and any attempt to actually govern northwestern Iraq in the long run would lead to economic disaster.
A guard at a Kurdish oil facility. Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images
"It'd be a permanent downward economic spiral — like Gaza, basically," Kirk Sowell, a risk analyst and Iraq expert, says. An ISIS mini-state is just not sustainable.When you pair the inevitable economic crisis in ISIS-held Iraq with ISIS's brutal legal system, it seems like Sunnis will eventually tire of the group. That discontent may not be enough on its own to end the group's rule, especially if it still believes the Iraqi central government would be worse for them. But it creates an opening for Iraqi Prime Minister-delegate Haider al-Abadi to reach out to disaffected Sunnis. He might be able to make allies among Sunni tribal militias.
Meanwhile, ISIS may alienate some its core Iraqi allies: militias who support a Saddam-style Sunni dictatorship. They're generally secular and no fans of ISIS's vision of Islamic law, and are only allied with it to fight the government. If ISIS's Sunni allies turn against it, and the government does a better job making its rule look attractive, ISIS may lose the Sunni population — and most of its gains in northern Iraq. Again, that's not inevitable, and will require some tough political changes in Baghdad, but the point is that ISIS is far from invincible.
ISIS's hold in Syria, though, would be much, much harder to dislodge. It's hard to imagine either Assad or moderate anti-Assad rebels mounting an effective military campaign against ISIS in the near term. But rolling back ISIS in Iraq, and containing it to Syria, would be a major victory, though an incomplete one as it would leave ISIS with a chunk of Syria. Still, this would limit the group's reach in the Middle East and blunt its global appeal. And when Syria's civil war finally does end, whenever that happens, eliminating ISIS will be the winning side's first priority.
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