The Rise of Islamic State Read Online Free PDF Page A

seizing even part of Baghdad, one of the great Arab capitals and former seat of the Caliphate, would give credibility to its claim to be founding a new state.

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In Denial
    On August 8, the US Air Force started bombing ISIS in Iraq, and on September 23, the generals added ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda representative in Syria, to its targets. The militants, who had moved their men and equipment out of buildings and locations that could be easily hit, reverted to the guerrilla tactics that had served them well in the past.
    In the US and Britain (which began air operations in Iraq on September 27), there was bombast about “degrading and destroying” ISIS, but there was no evidence of a long-term plan other than to contain and harass the jihadis by military means. As so often duringthe US military intervention in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, there was excessive focus by the media on the actions of Western governments as the prime mover of events. This was accompanied by an inadequate understanding of the significance of developments on the ground in Iraq and Syria as the force really driving the crisis in both countries.
    Similarly, there was much joy in Western capitals when Iraq finally got rid of Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister and replaced him with Haider al-Abadi. The new administration was billed as more inclusive of Sunni Arabs and Kurds than under Maliki, but it was still dominated by the Dawa party, which had even more members in the cabinet than previously, and other Shia religious parties. Abadi promised the Sunni that there would be an end to the bombardment of Sunni civilian areas; but in one week in September Fallujah was shelled on six out of seven days, with twenty-eight civilians killed and 118 wounded, according to the local hospital.
    The degree of political change was exaggerated, and not enough attention was given to the fact that Abadi, even with ISIS fighters a few miles from Baghdad, was unable to get the Iraqi parliament to approve his choices for the crucial posts of defense and interior ministers until October. Reidar Visser, the Norwegian expert onIraq, rated this failure as “far more significant than the plethora of international gatherings that are currently going on in the name of defeating ISIS in Iraq.”
    A pointer to the real state of affairs at this time was the outcome of a weeklong siege of an Iraqi army base at Saqlawiyah, just outside Fallujah, at the end of which ISIS fighters overran the position, killing or capturing most of the garrison. An Iraqi officer who escaped was quoted as saying that “of an estimated 1,000 soldiers in Saqlawiyah, only about 200 had managed to flee.” ISIS said it had seized or destroyed five tanks and forty-one Humvees in liberating the area “from the filth of the Safavids [Shia].” Surviving Iraqi soldiers complained that during the siege they had received no reinforcements or supplies of ammunition, food or water, though they were only forty miles from Baghdad. In other words, three and a half months after the fall of Mosul and six weeks after the start of US air strikes, the Iraqi army was still unable to withstand an ISIS assault or carry out an elementary military operation. As at Mosul and Tikrit, the apparently Napoleonic successes of ISIS were partly explained by the incapacity of the Iraqi army.
    In Syria the air strikes likewise led ISIS to revert to guerrilla-style operations, aside from two offensives it had launched in the north against Kurdish enclaves.Some rebel units around Damascus, which had earlier given themselves Islamic-sounding names to attract Saudi and Gulf financing, opportunistically switched to more secular-sounding titles in a bid to attract American support. Jabhat al-Nusra, which, possibly to its own surprise, had been targeted by the US, condemned the American air raids and pledged common action with other jihadis against “the Crusaders.” As in Iraq, it was not going to be easy to turn the Sunni and the