Tag Archives: Syria

Is the US trying to build a new case for war in Syria?

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Various hints become more concrete today as the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that ISIS could only be stopped by entering the Syrian civil war directly:

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday afternoon that it would not be possible to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria without attacking its fighters in Syria.

General Dempsey, speaking at a news conference with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, did not commit the United States to carrying out airstrikes in Syria, and the Obama administration’s broader strategy for defeating the Sunni militant group remained unclear.

 
Although I think it’s fair to say that acting against ISIS in Iraq only would not really defeat or destroy them, I also don’t think that’s an automatic case for escalating to jump into the mess in Syria. The policy so far has been a sort of updated version of the Cold War “containment doctrine,” but taking the further step of intervening in Syria (rather than just Iraq) would be a bit like the U.S. trying to contain the spread of communism into South Vietnam by attacking North Vietnam from the air. On paper, it may have made logical sense (cut the external support, contain the threat outside the borders), but we never really had a coherent plan there either — since we didn’t invade the north and we never really committed to toppling the regime or replacing it with anything — and look how that turned out.

I’m sure they think it’s a similar situation and therefore also shouldn’t be done piecemeal (like Vietnam was, which bled us out). But going into Syria at all opens the door to having to go in completely. Containment requires enough energy on its own without having to go the extra mile of ending the threat everywhere and filling the vacuum it leaves behind.

I’m particularly frustrated by the fact this is coming up again, given that members of Congress and the US public (as well as the UK parliament and British public) made very clear last August and September that they were not interested in getting U.S. forces directly involved in Syria’s civil war. On top of today’s pronouncement by Dempsey, there were claims last weekend by Syrian rebel leaders who oppose both ISIS and the Syrian government that the US had asked them to try to drum up global support for U.S. military actions in Syria. Which, combined with the official outrage over the beheading of an American photojournalist, makes this all sound like a manufactured government effort to whip up public outrage and by extension support for military actions the public rejected a year ago.

In other words: if at first you don’t succeed (in rallying public support for illegal, unilateral involvement in a quagmire by choice), try, try again … 365 days later.
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Summary of developments in northern Iraq for August 9, 2014

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The Obama Administration is apparently determined to prevent the fall of Erbil, Kurdistan Region’s capital, at all costs (or at the very least whatever it takes short of ground troops — though that might be on the table, too, as discussed below). It’s one of the advantages of being a longstanding protectorate and ally of the United States. The President ordered airstrikes on ISIS missile launchers and mortars as soon as Erbil came under long-range attack because most of the U.S. presence in Iraq (outside Baghdad itself) is located there and locals were already evacuating in a panic. The concern was that mass evacuation left Americans at the Erbil consulate and other sites even more vulnerable.

The U.S. military also asserts that the ISIS capture of Mosul Dam poses a risk to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, so I suspect it’s within the realm of possibility that we may see U.S. Special Forces land to re-take it very soon. Presumably this would be a very limited action to eject ISIS troops from the dam facilities and (one hopes) set up more secure defenses to help local paramilitaries and the Iraqi security forces hold it against future attacks. The destruction of this Tigris river dam, as attempted unsuccessfully by Saddam Hussein in 2003, would likely release quasi-apocalyptic flood conditions on the rest of Iraq to the south. That, however, would require ISIS to make the calculation that destroying the city of Mosul and much of their own territory in the process was worth the destructive power further south. It seems more probable they will use the dam, which is the country’s largest hydroelectric dam, to cut off water and power to the south. A 65-foot tall wall of water smashing through Mosul, the most important city in ISIS hands, seems a bit too Hollywood. Thus, it might not make much sense for the U.S. military to try to re-take the dam.

On the other northern front, Syrian Kurdish forces say they have broken out 10% of the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar, which is located near the Iraq-Syria border. They will be taken across into an anti-ISIS rebel-held area of Syrian Kurdistan.

The mountain, which is perhaps better described as a 25-mile-long and 10-mile-wide ridge, is a dozen or so miles from the Syrian border.

USGS Satellite Image of Mount Sinjar ridge. Dark, bent line in the upper left corner is the Syrian border.

USGS Satellite Image of Mount Sinjar ridge. Dark, bent line in the upper left corner is the Syrian border.

It’s a very distressing situation. Before any evacuations, 40-50,000 people were trapped on a mountain without food or water, completely surrounded by ISIS forces. The latter are reported slowly starting to move in and are snatching women and girls. U.S. and Kurdish relief aircraft are continuing to drop food, water, and other supplies on to the mountain — reportedly under enemy fire.

Meanwhile, the Kurdistan Region has had to absorb 200,000 internally displaced Iraqis since Monday alone. On top of that, tens of thousands of local residents started moving southward within the region on Thursday in an effort to evacuate before ISIS invades.

Iraq’s Air Force: Incompetent or Intentionally Cruel?

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The main difference between the Syrian Air Force and the Iraqi Air Force seems at first glance to be intentionality versus pure incompetence. They’re using the same tactics, but the Syrian regime is obviously doing it on purpose, whereas the Iraqi government — one could argue — just can’t be bothered to be more careful and probably lacks the training to do so.

However, it doesn’t really matter about training (or intent) when the main problem is using exploding barrels instead of proper bombs. No guidance system, no guarantee of immediate explosion (i.e. ongoing risk), and they’ve been bombing areas that don’t even have ISIS fighters present. Recently, while resenting political heat from his erstwhile Western backers, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki openly praised the Syrian Air Force and the Syrian regime for its actions against ISIS.

The Human Rights Watch video below shows the aftermath — and presents eyewitness accounts — of barrel-bombing raids this past June on Fallujah, a western Iraqi city that was a hotbed of Sunni resistance after the U.S. invasion in 2003:

Screen Shot 2014-08-08 at 2.15.23 AM

 
Fallujah fell to ISIS, at least temporarily, as early as January of this year, and the Maliki government strongly hinted at the time that they blamed the residents for the city’s capture — and viewed them as collaborators against Baghdad. The city is now facing what amounts to collective punishment. But is this policy intentional or just really inept?

As I noted yesterday, even when the Iraqi Air Force attempts to hit actual ISIS targets — in the most recent case an ISIS-run court that was holding 50 prisoners, probably from the Iraqi military or anti-ISIS paramilitary forces — they are just appallingly awful at their jobs.

Iraqi airstrikes didn’t even make it past day 1 without indiscriminately obliterating big clusters of people who weren’t the intended target because the air force lacks the training — and desire — to be more careful or conscientious about their target selection. Killing 50 prisoners from your own side, while trying to liberate them by way of airstrikes, is not a smooth move.

 
That instance was probably an accident, even if an altogether unsurprising one. But the seemingly random aerial targeting of northern and western Sunni-majority cities and towns with crude and improvised bombs, throughout 2014 (even before the fall of Mosul to ISIS), seems to point to a much more serious total lack of regard for the lives of Iraq’s sectarian minorities by the Maliki government and perhaps even an active desire to do them harm.

A one-time accident would be one thing. Repeated attacks on populated areas, without real evidence of militant presence, and without any effort whatsoever to reduce casualties or even to use real munitions, suggests an intent to repay alleged rebellious behavior in-kind, just as the Alawite-run/Shia-supported dictatorship in neighboring Syria has done repeatedly throughout its civil war. Small wonder Maliki has such kind words for their model actions.

And that is exactly what many observers were trying to raise earlier this year about the heavy-handed and Shia-supremacist government he was running. The Iraqi government, as currently run and led, is its own biggest enemy. Without a major sea change, popular anger and resentment will continue to fuel disunity, separatism, and sectarian violence.

ISIS rolls back Kurdish forces in Iraq. What’s next?

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ISIS — now known as “Islamic State” following its recent declaration of establishment — just won a significant operation against what is arguably Iraq’s most effective fighting force, the Kurdish Peshmerga paramilitaries. So, everything is probably really about to go sideways now.

The immediate loss of two more towns is another destabilizing and demoralizing blow:

The Islamic State captured the northern towns of Sinjar and Zumar on Saturday, prompting an estimated 40,000 from the minority Yazidi sect to flee, said Jawhar Ali Begg, a spokesman for the community.
[…]
“Their towns are now controlled by [Islamic State] and their shrine has been blown up,” Begg told The Associated Press. The group gave the Yazidis, who follow an ancient religion with links to Zoroastrianism, an ultimatum to convert to Islam, pay a tax or face death, Begg added.

 

But perhaps worse, through this operation, ISIS captured another northern oil field (number 5 in Iraq, not to mention their Syrian oil and gas fields), as well as the largest dam in all of Iraq, the massive hydroelectric Mosul Dam on the Tigris River. With every flare-up in violence or war since the 1986, there have been persistent fears that someone will intentionally blow it up to cause torrential and lethal downstream flooding in many major Iraqi cities.

The Kurdish troops, who retreated in the face of the ISIS advance after some fighting, assert that they were hung out to dry — not even getting sufficient ammunition assistance — by the central government of Iraq, which has been simultaneously blasting their separatist tendencies and explicitly relying upon them to “hold the line” against ISIS while they figure out what the do. The Kurds have been responsible for protecting thousands of refugees fleeing the city of Mosul, the center of ISIS operations in Iraq.
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Did Eastern Syria really fall to ISIS?

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There have been a number of frantic headlines in the past couple days reporting things likes “Extremist Group Takes Syrian Towns, Key Oil Field”. The suggestion is that more dominoes are falling and key leaders/communities are pledging themselves sincerely to ISIS rule.

Reading between the lines and below the lede, I suspect that the story there is less some dramatic conquest by ISIS and more of another ephemeral mass defection of the neo-feudal eastern Syrian “oil sheiks” — a very loose group of local warlords who have been using the civil war to make their surrounding territories into independent fiefdoms producing oil, gas, and power for all sides willing to pay. That’s a very tenuous alliance for ISIS, because these sheiks have switched sides constantly during the war. In some cases, some were producing and selling gas and power to both the Qaeda-backed Nusra Front and the government at the same time. As I explained it about a year ago:

The pre-Socialism clan system is re-asserting itself in the midst of the chaos because people need local order and income. These clan administrators take control of local oil & gas production and then essentially pay electricity or gas tributes to both the regime and the Islamist rebels to keep them off their backs.

 
I’m betting they defect back the moment they see an opportunity. At the moment, ISIS has access to a lot of heavy weaponry stolen in Iraq. It’s exactly the kind of stuff these warlords have previous expressed interest in acquiring through their oil and gas bartering.

Why is the UN not in the Iraq intervention discussions?

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In a new op-ed in Al Jazeera, Vartan Oskanian suggests that Iraq is ripe for a multilateral intervention against ISIS under the aegis of the United Nations. Oskanian, who served from 1998 to 2008 as Foreign Minister of Armenia and originally hails from Syria, is a longtime proponent of multilateralism in the Middle East and the world in general. He was one of the key figures in finagling post-Soviet Armenia’s (unusual) diplomatic position to be partially integrated with Europe and NATO but still strategically allied with and supported by Russia, without making everyone mad (a position Ukrainians right about now are probably wishing they could have secured).

In the essay, Oskanian outlines a number of reasons the UN should be involved, condemns the failure of everyone’s unilateralism in the region, and discusses the success of George H.W. Bush’s delimited intervention in Iraq with a multilateral coalition — and Soviet support. He also identifies some points where the Americans and Russians of today could cooperate in Iraq after the new low point reached in relations during the Crimea/Eastern Ukraine crises of this year.

One point that didn’t really come up in the essay is that this is one rare time when Russia and the United States both oppose the same faction, operating in two different countries. And China also isn’t a fan of non-state actors (and specifically jihadists) seizing large territories and oil fields. Usually, in the past 2 decades, vetoes from Russia or China (or both) have been the sticking point on suggested interventions in places.

But despite their discontent over alleged NATO overreach after they agreed to let an intervention resolution on Libya slide through in 2011, neither of them wants to see ISIS taking over parts of the region — which is the same position as the United States. Russia is selling military technology to both the Syrian and Iraqi governments already to help fight ISIS, and the the U.S. which doesn’t really support either government anymore still doesn’t want ISIS to gain strength within either country.

So why wouldn’t the 5 Major Powers (those with veto power) all agree on some kind of intervention — even a very limited one, probably in Iraq only — if it were brought to the UN Security Council? I mean, maybe they actually wouldn’t, but isn’t it worth trying? (That is, worth trying, if an intervention is going to happen at all. I don’t support such an intervention, but if it’s going to happen, it shouldn’t been unilateral.)

That in turn raises a good question. Why isn’t the UN even mentioned (publicly) in the US discussions on intervening in Iraq? Not even by the Obama Administration, which came into office rejecting the war and purporting to embrace international norms and multilateralism. Has everyone just totally given up on getting cooperation with Russia on anything ever again, at the UN or anywhere else? That’s going to get pretty self-fulfilling pretty quickly. Or has the administration just gone full unilateralist on us all?

Credit: NordNordWest, Spesh531 - Wikimedia

ISIS control on June 12, 2014. Credit: NordNordWest, Spesh531 – Wikimedia

Maliki appears to fully switch foreign alliances

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Maliki, having been dumped by the Americans, enthusiastically announced the purchase of military jets from Russia and welcomed airstrikes by the Assad regime in Syria on Iraqi border positions held by ISIS rebels.

It sound as if he has thrown himself in with the Russian and Syrian governments, who are already allied with Iran, his primary benefactor, in the Syrian civil war and on the nuclear issue.