How ISIS Spread in the Middle East

““It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition: that it must be lived forwards.” This observation was made in 1843 by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in a journal entry, but it might have been written about the contemporary Middle East.”

“We have been living the Islamic State forwards, surprised at every turn, but we can perhaps begin to understand it backwards. Although ISIS took most of the world by surprise when it swept into the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014, the group and its forebears had been proclaiming their goals for a decade. Like many consequential events, this one didn’t sneak up on policymakers; they simply didn’t see what was taking shape in front of them. ISIS told us exactly what it was going to do, and then did it. This was a secret conspiracy hiding in plain sight.”

“As has been said of the Episcopal Church (forgive the comparison), ISIS is solid at the core but loose at the edges.”

“What is ravaging the Middle East right now is obviously deeper than ISIS. It has become commonplace over the last year to observe that we are witnessing the collapse of the post-Ottoman order—that the “lines in the sand” conjured in 1916 by the British and French diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot are being blown to dust.”

“ISIS has religious, psychological, and technological faces. But in some fundamental respects it is an anti-colonial movement that takes as its reference point Islam’s pre-colonial conception of power—an Islamic state, a Sunni caliphate. Even if ISIS is crushed, this idea of “our caliphate” is likely to persist, and return.”

“The story of ISIS teaches the same basic lesson that emerged from America’s other failures in the Middle East over the last decade: Attempts by the United States or Islamist rebels to topple authoritarian regimes—in Iraq, Libya, and now Syria—create power vacuums. This empty political space will be filled by extremists unless the United States and its allies build strong local forces that can suppress terrorist groups and warlords both. When the U.S. creates such local forces, it must be persistent. If it withdraws from these efforts, as America did in Iraq in 2011, it invites mayhem. Halfway American intervention has produced nothing but trouble. Rebels have gotten enough support to continue fighting, but not enough to win.”

“History teaches that such wars end through a combination of the exhaustion of local combatants and an agreement among major regional and international powers on a formula to curtail the fighting and rebuild some governance”

“Usually the settlement ratifies the informal cantonal boundaries that have emerged during the fighting, so that each sect has what amounts to a “safe zone” in a decentralized state that functions under the umbrella of the old nation.”

“Middle Eastern wars rarely end with outright victory and permanent stability, so the word “settlement” may promise too much. At best, for many years, it may simply mean stable ceasefire lines, reduced bloodshed, fewer refugees, and less terrorism.”

“I share a comment made to me in June 2003, as this terrible story was beginning, by a Syrian businessman named Raja Sidawi. Here’s a passage from the Washington Post column that quoted my friend’s warning: “I am sorry for America,” Sidawi said. “You are stuck. You have become a country of the Middle East. America will never change Iraq, but Iraq will change America.” …”

“This tragic sensibility—the sense that in most instances, things do not work out as you might have hoped—is generally lacking in the American character. Americans are an optimistic people: They have difficulty imagining the worst. That was why 9/11 was so shocking. Most Americans never considered that such devastation could be visited on them.”

“Arabs grow up in a culture where it is always best to assume the worst. Sidawi rattled off the list of wars and disasters that have afflicted the Middle East almost continuously since he was born in 1939. That is the bloody history in which America has now enmeshed itself. “You will learn the culture of death,” warned Sidawi. And so we have.”

“The Koranic message of submission and jihad is perhaps as powerful now for believers as it was in 622 A.D., when the Prophet Muhammad gathered his followers in Medina and began raiding neighboring areas.”

“What is most striking is the very simple but powerful program of action outlined by Muhammad: form a righteous community (umma), go to a safe place (hijra), and from there embark on jihad against the unrighteous,” noted Hoyland.”

““The Arabs who invaded the two empires were not a tribal horde but an organized force, some of whose members had acquired military skill and experience in the service of the empires or in the fighting after the death of the Prophet,” he wrote. (Reading Hourani’s words, I couldn’t help but think of the unlikely contemporary alliance between ISIS religious zealots and ex-Baathists who served in Saddam Hussein’s most secret and brutal units.)”

“U.S. airstrikes killed Zarqawi in June 2006, but his renegade followers nevertheless went on to declare their state, the Islamic State of Iraq, in October 2006, without consulting al-Qaeda leaders.”

“A few embers of Zarqawi’s Islamic state remained, kept alive by flickering Sunni rage. The flame was nurtured at U.S.-organized Iraqi prisons such as Camp Bucca, where religious Sunni detainees mingled with former members of Saddam’s Baath Party, and the nucleus of a reborn movement took shape.”

“It’s now clear that the “80-percent solution” is shorthand for the violent dismemberment of Iraq.”

“Disentangling the story of ISIS’s expansion in Iraq at least produces a coherent narrative. That’s less true in Syria. The spread of the Islamic State there seems, in the famous French dictum, “worse than a crime, a blunder.””

“We’ll never know whether a more aggressive U.S. policy—arming the moderate Syrian opposition sooner or bombing the Syrian government’s command-and-control infrastructure after President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his people—could have produced a better outcome. But it’s hard to imagine a policy that would have done worse.”

“Where ISIS experienced organic growth in Iraq (in the sense that a metastasizing cancer can be called organic), in Syria it seems more a case of implantation.”

“For all the mistakes in U.S. policy, the regional powers—Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar—have taken truly reckless actions, making Syria a cockpit for their proxy wars. It was Turkey that allowed a southern border with Syria so porous that it offered ISIS and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra what amounted to a logistical safe zone. It was Iran that marched Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia whose mission was fighting Israel, into Syria to save Assad. It was Saudi Arabia and Qatar, jockeying for regional influence, that funded a scattershot array of Sunni militias that proved easy recruiting grounds for the extremists (and in this sense supported the extremists). And it was Russia that stood by while its client, Assad, bombed civilians and ravaged his nation, and then began doing the bombing itself.”

“Russia’s recent military intervention in Syria—nominally to fight the extremists, but more to prop up a government that protects Russian interests—is power politics in its rawest form.”

“The regime wasn’t so lucky a few weeks later when protests spread to Daraa, the provincial capital south of Damascus. The Houranis (as the people of this region are known) are famously feisty, and they pushed the local police and military hard. The authorities, led by a bullheaded provincial governor, started firing back. Civilians were slaughtered. And the Syrian revolution had begun.”

“Several factors made this revolution especially disorganized (and prey to manipulation by extremists). First, it was a genuinely bottom-up movement, with each mosque gathering its own young men into brigades to defend the local area and then (in theory) fight a larger war to overthrow the regime. The Muslim Brotherhood, devastated by Hafez al-Assad in 1982, lacked the discipline and organization that could have helped weld a strong opposition. The moderates were hapless.”

“Second, as in Iraq, the revolution arrived in a country that had suppressed deep sectarian divisions. Sunnis appreciated the stability and “Arabism” that the Assad regimes had brought, but they felt humiliated by their subservience to leaders who many derided as Alawite bumpkins from the mountains. In light of these tensions, Syrian minorities banded together behind the regime.”

“In October 2012, I traveled inside the country for two days with the help of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and came to three basic judgments: First, there aren’t enough weapons for the rebels to defeat Assad’s forces, and almost every Syrian I talked to thinks this is America’s fault; second, the commanders of the Free Syrian Army are trying to exercise better command and control over what has been a disorganized, ragtag operation; and third, in this chaotic and under-resourced fight, the power of the Salafist jihadists—who ask only to be martyrs—appears to be growing.”

“The extremists of ISIS and al-Qaeda filled the vacuum left by the moderate opposition. Early in the war, the momentum seemed to be with Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate. When I asked an FSA commander in Aleppo in 2012 whether his men fought with Nusra, he answered: “Of course, they’re the best fighters.” If the FSA needed hardened men for an assault, they would turn to the suicide bombers of Nusra, who were often foreign fighters looking for a ticket to paradise. I asked a Syrian doctor what he had learned from treating rebel casualties at the front. A large majority of those with serious wounds were from Nusra, he said. Inevitably, people, arms, and money began flowing to the fighters who were the toughest and best.”

“You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to understand why Assad allowed ISIS to put down roots: He needed a threat to show the West why his regime’s survival mattered; he needed to demonstrate that there was a worse Syrian face than his own—that of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS’s leader.”

“What’s the pathway out of the Syrian disaster? Based on my reporting, I’d offer several conclusions, which haven’t changed much in the last three years:”

“The best hope for Syria’s survival is a political solution—jointly brokered by the U.S., Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—that begins the transition to a new, post-Assad government.”

“But such a political solution will be impossible without a strong, U.S.-backed opposition that can merge with “acceptable” elements of the Syrian army to manage a transition from Assad.”

“This transition process will be fostered by safe zones in the north and south, where humanitarian assistance can be directed, Syrian refugees can return, and political compromise can be rediscovered.”

“If these steps cannot be taken, the result will be the continuing growth of ISIS and other extremist groups, and the full collapse of a fractured Syria into a failed state and terrorist haven. Russian-Iranian military intervention can widen the boundaries of Assad’s rump state, but it cannot rebuild a united Syria.”

“Syria offers a grim lesson: Muddled U.S. policies can produce as disastrous an outcome as military intervention.”

“My friend Raja Sidawi was right 12 years ago: America has not changed Iraq or Syria, but the wars there have indeed changed America. Americans have learned the limits of military power and covert action; the U.S. has helped create enemies that did not exist before George W. Bush’s mistaken invasion of Iraq in 2003”