Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East

by Patrick Cockburn

  There is a further reason why IS may find it more easy to find and use potential suicide bombers outside the caliphate. One of the setbacks it has suffered this year is the loss of its main border crossing between Syria and Turkey at Tal Abyad, which was captured by the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) in June. Half the 550-mile frontier between the Tigris and Euphrates is now held by the YPG, so IS access to the outside world is much more limited than before. The US has put intense pressure on Turkey not to allow IS and other Salafi-jihadi groups to cross the border into Syria west of the Euphrates. Volunteers who might previously have travelled through Turkey to join IS in Syria will now stay at home and provide a pool of committed manpower for use in suicide operations. IS is under unprecedented military pressure in Iraq and Syria, but this does not mean it is going to implode. It can fight defensively as well as offensively. It looks as if it will not fight to the finish in battles in which enemy ground troops are supported by the US or Russian air forces. IS commanders are reported to believe that they made a mistake in fighting for so long at Kobani, where they may have lost more than 2,000 fighters to US air strikes. Instead, they will rely more on guerrilla tactics in Syria and Iraq and spread the conflict with terrorist attacks abroad.

  Monday, 28 December 2015

  THE PARTITION OF THE MIDDLE EAST

  Sectarian and ethnic cleansing by all sides in Syria and Iraq is becoming more intense, ensuring that there are few mixed areas left in the two countries and, even if the war ends, many refugees will find it too dangerous to return to their homes.

  Communities which once lived together in peace are today so frightened of each other after years of savage warfare that the more powerful sect or ethnic group is forcing out the weaker one. This pattern is repeating itself everywhere from the Sunni towns captured by Shia militiamen in provinces around Baghdad to Christian enclaves in central Syria under threat from Isis, and in Turkmen villages just south of the Syrian-Turkish border being bombed by Russian aircraft.

  The inability of Syrians and Iraqis to return home in safety means that Europe and the Middle East will have to cope for decades to come with an irreversible refugee crisis brought on by the war.

  There are good reasons for everybody to be afraid, though outside powers play down the sectarian or ethnic agenda of their local Syrian proxies and allies. "We will end up like the Christians, being forced out of the country," says a young Sunni photographer, Mah moud Omar, who once lived in Ramadi in the overwhelmingly Sunni province of Anbar. Many fled when Isis captured the city in May which is now under assault by the military forces of the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad trying to recapture it. Some 1.4 million people from Anbar or 43 per cent of its population are displaced, according to the International Organisation for Migration.

  The Sunni Arab tribes in Raqqa province in Syria issued a statement earlier this month accusing Kurdish forces, the People's Protection Units (YPG), of displacing Arabs from the Tal Abyad town on the border crossing with Turkey. It says that "no YPG fighter can enter the Arab areas where our fighters are present". The YPG denies that it has forced Arabs to leave Tal Abyad, but Syrian Kurds often see Sunni Arabs as Isis collaborators.

  Smaller communities such as the Christians in Iraq and Syria are being eliminated. In the village of Sadad, once a home to 5,000 Syriac Orthodox Christians off the highway linking Damascus and Homs, people are leaving because there is only a few hours of electricity a day and prices are very high, but above all because villagers are terrified of being slaughtered by Isis. Two years ago extreme Sunni jihadis, this time led by the al-Qa’ida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, captured Sadad and held it for 10 days, killing 45 Christians and destroying or looting 14 churches before being driven out by the Syrian army.

  In Syria many of the estimated 5.3 million refugees and 6.5 million internally displaced people are likely to find that their houses and neighbourhoods have been destroyed or permanently occupied by well-armed members of a hostile community.

  The same is true in Iraq. Describing Sunni villages south of Kirkuk whose inhabitants have been driven out by Shia and Kurds, a human rights specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, said "if the Sunni flee then people say it is proof they were working with Isis and, if they stay, they are members of Isis sleeper cells who are waiting to strike. They can't win either way." Fear of "sleeper cells" is pervasive in both Iraq and Syria.

  The mass flight and expulsion taking place is on the scale of that in India and Pakistan at the time of Partition in 1947 or in Germany at the end of the Second World War. "Efforts at local ethnic cleansing are already making Syria's de facto partition more and more irremediable," says Professor Fabrice Balanche of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in a study called Ethnic Cleansing Threatens Syria's Unity. He adds that "sectarian diversity is disappearing in many areas of the country".

  The takeover of a whole area by a single sect, ethnic group or political affiliation tends to be difficult to reverse because houses are distributed to new owners who do not want to give them up.

  The Sunni Arabs have been at the heart of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad since 2011 and likewise see non-Sunni communities as supporters of Assad, and hence the targeting of Sunni districts by government artillery and bombing. Whole districts of Damascus and Homs once under rebel control are today a sea of ruins with every building shattered by explosives. But the Sunni community is also split, often along social lines, with the better off and better-educated siding with Assad against the poorer, more rural and tribal Sunnis.

  Mercy is scarce in the war in Syria and Iraq. Shia in Iraq say that since 2003 Isis and its al-Qa’ida-type predecessors have systematically targeted Shia mosques, marketplaces, bus queues and pilgrimages, killing thousands of civilians. When Isis took northern and western Iraq last year its fighters filmed themselves executing 1,700 young Shia military recruits near Tikrit. Last August Isis raped, murdered and enslaved members of the Yazidi minority. Captured Syrian soldiers were ritually decapitated. In June an Isis suicide squad killed 220 Syrian Kurdish men, women and children in Kobani.

  Terror and counter-terror created by these atrocities determine how different communities in Iraq and Syria perceive each other and may make it impossible for them to live together ever again.

  CONSTANT CYCLE OF VIOLENCE (2016)

  Sunday, 17 January 2016

  ISIS BOMBS

  It has been a week of bombings across the world, most of them carried out by ISIS. Some were highly publicised because they took place in the centre of large cities and involved foreigners, such as the suicide bombing on 12 January close to the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul which killed 10 people, nine of them German tourists. Two days later gunmen and bombers claiming allegiance to IS killed two people in Jakarta in an attack that topped the international news agenda because it appeared to show that IS has a frightening global reach. Furthermore, it took place in a city of 10 million people which is a media hub, ensuring that there were plenty of television cameras to record events.

  The reverse is true of a double bombing in Muqdadiyah, a town in the Iraqi province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, which took place the day before the Istanbul attack. Though the casualty figures of 46 killed and 55 wounded were far worse than in Turkey and Indonesia combined, the slaughter was scarcely noticed by the Iraqi or international media. IS had first exploded a bomb outside a coffee shop, allegedly frequented by Shia militiamen belonging to the Hashd al-Shaabi movement, and followed this up soon after with a second explosion that killed people who had gathered to see what was happening or to help the injured.

  The attack provoked, as IS probably intended, retaliatory attacks on Sunni by Shia militia who killed 15 people, burned seven Sunni mosques and at least 36 shops. Diyala is a mixed Sunni-Shia province, famous for fruit growing when I first visited in the 1990s but notorious over the last 12 years for sectarian warfare. Even within Iraq there was little publicity for the kill
ings last week, because people in Baghdad are used to this happening in Diyala, the Shia-dominated government and Shia militias were not keen to publicise it, and the risks of doing so were demonstrated when two journalists from Sharqiya television channel were killed.

  The publicity generated by a "terrorist" attack may exaggerate or understate its political significance. In Indonesia, it was in the interests of IS, the Indonesian government and the perpetrators of the attack to emphasise that it was similar in method and intent to the massacre in Paris on 13 November.

  IS wants to show it can operate anywhere in the world, and the Indonesian government that it can largely thwart such evil intentions. In fact, IS does not seem to have had much to do with it, but the extreme Islamist faction that carried it out knows that it can instantly generate vast global interest and news coverage by labelling itself as the IS branch in Indonesia. The IS attack in Istanbul is important because it shows that the movement now considers itself to be at war with the Turkish state that between 2011 and early 2015 showed a tolerance for IS movements in and out of Turkey that were central to the growth of the movement. Ankara was sympathetic to all jihadi movements trying to bring down President Bashar al-Assad and saw IS as a counter-balance to the growing strength of the Syrian Kurds.

  Turkish policy towards Syria has been one miscalculation after another since the Syrian uprising began five years ago. Assad did not fall, and IS became much stronger than the Turks expected. Worst of all, not only did IS fighters fail to beat the Syrian Kurds in the four-and-a-half-month siege for the city of Kobani on the Turkish border, but the Kurds allied themselves with the United States and have been advancing with the help of thousands of US airstrikes. The 25,000 Kurdish soldiers of the People's Protection Units (YPG) are not on their own the most powerful military force in Syria, but backed by the largest air force in the world they are of crucial significance.

  Turkey is deeply alarmed by the rise of a militarily strong Kurdish quasi-state running along its southern flank in de facto alliance with the US and Russia. It has discovered to its cost that IS is not the answer to the Kurds, but it is not clear what is. Five years ago there were not wholly unrealistic dreams in Ankara of Turkey being a model for the new Middle East, and spreading its influence through Iraq and Syria. Instead, it is now in danger of being excluded from the region after allying itself to Saudi Arabia and Qatar and supporting or turning a blind eye to the activities of extreme jihadi groups such as IS, the al-Qa’ida affiliate, the al-Nusra Front and the ideologically similar Ahrar al-Sham.

  The problem for Turkey and the Sunni powers is that they now have to raise their stakes in Syria if they want to stay in the game. They did this earlier in the year by backing an anti-Assad offensive that made gains on the ground, but sparked a Russian and Iranian counter-intervention in September that enabled Assad and the Syrian army to go over to the attack. Turkey is getting close to the point where it has to become militarily engaged in the war for northern Syria or become a marginal player. The sealing of the Turkish border by Syrian Kurds and a Russian-backed Syrian army would be a body blow to all the other anti-Assad forces in Syria from which it would be difficult for them to recover.

  The Syrian army has not won any decisive victories since the Russians intervened, but its soldiers are advancing rather than pulling back. The armed opposition as a whole is on the retreat. This is one of several reasons why the Syrian peace talks that begin in Vienna on 25 January are unlikely to succeed. Assad and the combination of powers behind him - Russia, Iran and Hezbollah - feel that they are getting stronger rather than weaker so there is less reason for them to compromise.

  The Russians evidently enjoy interacting with the US in a way that recalls the super-power bargaining of the Cold War. But a former Arab diplomat points out that "Syria has two separate alliances with Russia and Iran and, of these, the Iranian one is the most important." A defeat in Syria has always been a far more devastating prospect for Iran than Russia. The Iranians are the leaders of the region-wide Shia axis that is one of the guarantees of Assad's survival and they have also, hitherto, provided badly needed money to Damascus which the Russians have not. This limits Russia's capacity to put pressure on Assad on Vienna even if it wanted to.

  The other problem facing negotiations in Vienna is that the armed opposition groups which are doing most of the shooting will not be present. The most important of these are IS and al-Nusra, while Ahrar al-Sham is ambivalent towards Saudi Arabia's attempt to unite the opposition. There is little point in having local ceasefires, unless al-Nusra and the other extreme fundamentalists agree to them and get something in return.

  Guerrilla forces tend to disintegrate if they are not fighting an enemy. It is difficult to see why the war should not go on.

  Monday, 1 February 2016

  ISIS CAN ONLY BE CRUSHED IN IRAQ IF DEFEATED IN SYRIA

  Isis is losing ground in Iraq, but Kurdish leaders say its retreat is slow and do not expect to eliminate it unless it is also defeated in Syria. Real progress is limited, despite exaggerated claims by the Iraqi government that its soldiers have won decisive victories in cities such as Ramadi and Tikrit.

  "The initial attack by Daesh [Isis] in 2014 was like the Mongols, but they could not hold on to fixed positions," says Dr Najmaldin Karim, the Governor of Kirkuk province, in an interview with i. "But this does not mean that they are being destroyed in Iraq and this will not happen until they lose in Syria."

  He says that Kurdish Peshmerga in Kirkuk have pushed Isis fighters, which almost captured the city 18 months ago, some 10 to 20 miles further back but the front line is generally static.

  The Iraqi government and the authorities in the KRG, which controls at least a quarter of Iraq, have boasted that they are defeating Isis by recapturing cities like Sinjar, west of Mosul and Ramadi, west of Baghdad. But these victories, won with the help of hundreds of air strikes by a US-led coalition, turned out to be less than decisive since Isis did not fight to the end in either place and withdrew in order to limit its losses.

  "Isis is reverting to guerrilla warfare," says Dr Karim, a native of Kirkuk and formerly a brain surgeon in Washington DC, explaining that people displaced from cities that have supposedly been recaptured by the government are not going home because Isis is nearby or they fear sectarian persecution.

  At Ramadi, for instance, once a Sunni Arab city with a population of 600,000, Isis killed 30 government soldiers on one day last week using snipers and suicide bombers. Isis even shot a video from a sniper's nest overlooking the city centre. An elderly couple from Tikrit, once Saddam Hussein's home town and retaken by the Iraqi army a year ago, told how they had fled to Irbil for the second time a week ago because of gun battles between progovernment forces and Isis.

  Even if displaced people and refugees return they may not find much to live in because anti-Isis offensives rely on heavy bombing that, in the case of Ramadi, has destroyed 80 per cent of the city.

  Isis was born out of the Islamic State of Iraq, which took advantage of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011 to spread to Syria. But it has never been as strong in Syria as it is in Iraq, where it holds Mosul, a city of 1.5 million people, and Fallujah, just west of Baghdad. In Iraq it is the only substantial armed opposition movement while in Syria there are many others, though it is the largest and most powerful. In Syria, Isis faces the highly effective Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and the Russian-backed Syrian army, which are threatening its positions in the north of the country.

  Just to the west of the Kurdish capital Irbil, General Sirwan Barzani, who commands a force of 15,000 Peshmerga troops, says that though Isis has suffered losses it can still launch attacks. He told the Independent: "Daesh are getting weaker, but they have a front line of 3,700km [surrounding the self-declared Caliphate in eastern Syria and western Iraq] and they can always collect 500 fighters and 10 suicide bombers to make an attack."

  He says that he has about 15,000 men,
though not all are on duty at the same time, to defend a front that is about 120km long.

  As in the rest of Iraq and Syria, the front lines are too long to be effectively manned and fortified, so each side can make a lunge forward but gains are difficult to hold. The Iraqi army and the Kurds have the great advantage of American air cover, but Isis takes refuge in elaborate tunnel systems and breaks up its forces into small units of eight to 10 men. Asked if Isis could be defeated, Gen Barzani points out that the US army in Iraq with 150,000 soldiers failed to defeat al-Qa’ida there.

  It is not only that anti-Isis forces in Iraq are too weak to win a decisive victory, but they are divided. Speaking about an assault on Mosul, which Isis has held since June 2014, Gen Barzani says that Peshmerga would not try to capture it alone and there are no Iraqi army soldiers in the region capable of doing so. He says that at Ramadi "between 60 and 65 per cent of the fighting was done by the Hashid al-Shaabi [the Shia militias] but we are told they will not take part in the battle for Mosul."

  This is different from the usual account of the fighting for Ramadi, where the ground forces in the centre of the city were drawn from Iraqi Special Forces. The US opposes the use of Shia militias in Sunni areas on the grounds that the Sunni inhabitants would fear a sectarian bloodbath.

  Claims in Washington and London that Isis is buckling under attacks by the Iraqi army and the Peshmerga look like wishful thinking on the plains around Kirkuk and Irbil. There have been significant successes but Isis fighters have not lost any of their core regions from which they began to attack two years ago.