Defeating Isis likely to take years, warn military analysts / FINANCIAL TIMES.

August 20, 2014 7:00 pm

Defeating Isis likely to take years, warn military analysts

By Sam Jones in London and Erika Solomon in Sayida / The Financial Times / http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9e453b4c-2881-11e4-8bda-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3B0W7WE5Q

The brutal murder of the American journalist James Foley on Tuesday has gruesomely raised the stakes in the international effort to battle the spread of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis).

The beheading has been a turning point for Isis, marking the first definite shift in its attention away from regional fighting and towards hurting the West and its citizens. It has also come as a visceral reminder for a hitherto-guarded Washington and its allies of what the violent jihadi group represents and the threat it poses.

The single act of terror has done little yet to change events on the ground. It shows that recent US air strikes – 35 in total over 72 hours in a blitz that propelled Kurdish peshmerga fighters to victory in retaking the strategically critical Mosul dam – have been significant enough to prompt a vicious response.

But even as the Kurds were celebrating their victory at the dam on Wednesday, Isis was succeeding elsewhere: an abortive assault by Iraq’s professional army on the city of Tikrit, 140km north of Baghdad stalled the previous day in the face of fierce resistance from the jihadis. It is the army’s third attempt to retake the city.

Without the overwhelming might of US air power, it seems, fighting Isis is still an uphill struggle.

Air strikes were “60 per cent responsible for the success of the operation at the Mosul Dam”, says Omar Othman Ibrahim, the peshmerga commander of western Kurdistan.

“What we faced I never faced before in my life,” he says, wearing the Kurdish uniform of a kuffiye and sirwal fatigues. “For one thing they [Isis] never settle a front for us to fight or to attack. They don’t have any lines where they set up weapons.”

“It doesn’t feel like fighting a battle,” he adds. “They never fight on foot and are always in vehicles, so very quick.”

The peshmerga’s next target will probably be Mount Sinjar and its environs – the site last week of a narrowly averted humanitarian crisis involving thousands of Yazidi refugees.

In the wake of Foley’s murder, it is likely that the US will again extend air support to such efforts.

In turn, though, that will raise questions over what the rationale for such air support – previously carefully couched in humanitarian terms – now is.

“The fight has been joined,” says Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and an expert in Islamist extremism. “I think Isis are going to lose, but its not going to be easy or quick. It’s going to be complex and its going to take years, not months.”

If the US does ramp up its air strikes, the effects will probably have a powerful first impact on Isis. “The air strikes are so far obviously working,” says Afzal Ashraf, a former British diplomat in Iraq and air force captain.

Mr Ashraf says the US will now be looking carefully to its other options too.

“Militarily the US is reluctant to get involved with regular troops on the ground, but what will probably happen is the CIA will come to play a much bigger role. They will look to destroy Isis’ leadership as they did with AQI.” Al-Qaeda in Iraq was Isis’ predecessor organisation and its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was assassinated in a targeted US drone strike in 2006.

The strategy, Mr Ashraf says, could be to force Isis’ leadership to “hide or die”.

At the peak of US efforts against the al-Qaeda network, operational commanders of the group had an average life expectancy of just two years. Any such effective targeted assassination campaign against Isis’ leadership, however, will itself be years in the making.

And in the meantime, there will be a limit to what air power alone will accomplish in hitting Isis’ regular assets and driving back its thousands of devoted fighters.

“Isis are fast to adapt and they will adapt to air strikes,” says Shashank Joshi, an extremism expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a UK think-tank. “The longer this goes on, the harder it will be to get at them or avoid civilian casualties.”

Isis is likely to show little compunction when it comes to using human shields to protect its fighters or their vehicles, analysts point out.

What we faced I never faced before in my life ... they never settle a front for us to fight or to attack. They don’t have any lines where they set up weapons

- Omar Othman Ibrahim, peshmerga commander

The broader picture is that Isis has so far proved itself extremely adept, tactically and strategically. Fighting them, experts say, will be far harder than fighting al-Qaeda.

“Isis’ military leaders have thought very hard about how to deal with multiple fronts and multiple theatres. They are a cohesive military force, not an insurgency,” says Jessica Lewis, a former US military intelligence officer in Iraq and now research director at the Institute for the Study of War.

To really combat Isis’ military structure, going after individual vehicles or checkpoints will not be enough, Ms Lewis believes. “Isis have repeatable processes and fixed sites from where they conduct their military operations. These should be targetable,” she says.

Ultimately, doing so may not be solely possible from the air.

In Mosul and Fallujah in Iraq and in Raqqa in Syria, for example, Isis has deeply embedded itself into the urban and social fabric of the cities. Air strikes, with their huge risk of collateral civilian damage, would be unconscionable.

To get rid of these urban centres of Isis will thus take tens of thousands of “boots on the ground”. For the US and its allies, the hope is that Iraq’s 200,000 strong army will step up to the plate. So far though, two months has barely been enough for US military advisers to whip Iraq’s shambolic security forces into shape after they were routed from most of Northern Iraq by Isis in early June, and it will take many months more to properly hone their fighting abilities.

Even with a revitalised Iraqi army, getting rid of Isis, particularly from cities, will be an incredibly hard task. The US surge of 2007, which saw 20 brigades deployed in Iraq, was only just able to contain Isis’ predecessor AQI, a smaller and less virulent organisation. Routing it from the cities took months of bloody work.

“It’s very difficult to retake a city. In Fallujah in 2004 we practically had to hermetically seal off the city,” says Mr Ashraf. “We literally went through every single house; through every single building.”

Isis rolled back into Fallujah in December and has held the city since. Many say that, as in Mosul, they never left.

“Military action alone buys you time and space,” says Mr Ashraf. “It doesn’t buy you a solution.”