A “hinge moment” may have been reached in the longtime battle against the Islamic State (IS or ISIS), as the jihadist movement has been “mustering forces in Syria’s Badiya desert, recruiting and training a new band of holy warriors to resurrect its dream of ruling a caliphate,” reports Brian Stewart in Quillette (October 10). This year, the number of attacks by the group in Syria and Iraq has doubled, with U.S. garrisons in Syria and units of the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) being primary targets. The goal of this offensive is to disable counter-terrorism patrols and free thousands of the group’s confederates from jail, who have been imprisoned since the Islamic State’s fall. But the U.S. has been largely passive in confronting threats of jihadism in Syria. Stewart writes that two distinct but mutually reinforcing attitudes are animating this desire to leave this theatre of war, and that unless both are confronted, ISIS may soon find that it has won yet another lease on life. The first of these attitudes is a “detached defeatism that imagines ISIS to be a resilient movement that will not yield to superior counterforce….This was the conventional wisdom throughout the West when the black flag of the Islamic State was first unfurled a decade ago…[I]t was said there was little that could be done to coerce ISIS into submission. It would remain a permanent nuisance.”
Source: Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In contrast, the second popular view of IS is marked by triumphalism. Since U.S. forces killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a raid in Syria in 2019, Donald Trump has claimed to have defeated the Islamic State. “Trump’s cheerleading conveys his visceral opinion that America has only a fleeting role in containing jihadist terror rather than an abiding commitment,” Stewart adds. These rival tendencies suggest that ISIS can be “safely ignored or at least easily contained. Once upon a time, it was believed that this kind of benign neglect would doom ISIS, which might burn itself out on the embers of its own radical theology and pornographic violence.” The conditions that created ISIS—the civil war in Syria and an overtly sectarian regime in Baghdad—“have been left to fester as part of a wider malign neglect of the Muslim Middle East in the aftermath of the Iraq war, and the lack of a hegemon has spawned a violent competition for power.” Armed groups have taken up the opportunity presented by the weakness of the current state system to press for adjustments and to try to affect them through force. In Iraq, the failure to check Iran and its Shi’ite proxies has allowed a variety of Sunni gangs to present themselves as defenders of last resort to an embattled Sunni minority, Stewart concludes.
(Quillette, https://quillette.com/2024/10/10/the-return-of-the-black-flags-isis-iraq-syria/?ref=quillette-daily-newsletter)
