Mosul and the Islamic State: Repercussions and Resistance

The Mosul Encounter

The Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi reached Mosul on 9 July 2017 to announce victory over the Islamic State. An official declaration of victory was proclaimed on 10 July. The prime minister congratulated the people of Iraq and the soldiers on what was termed as a ‘great victory’. The victory was significant as Mosul embodied the Islamic State’s last key urban monopoly in Iraq. A concerted military campaign was launched by the forces of the Iraqi government along with allied paramilitary forces, the ‘Peshmergas’ (owing allegiance to the Kurdistan Regional Government) and an international coalition against the Islamic State in Mosul to  recapture the city that had earlier been seized by the Islamic State in June 2014. There were repeated attempts to regain the city in 2015 and 2016.  The military expedition which came to be known as Operation ‘We Are Coming, Nineveh’ was initiated in October 2016 connoting the seize of Nineveh Governorate adjoining Mosul that was under the control of the Islamic State. Mosul is Iraq’s second most populous city. It is situated in the northern part of the country on the west bank of the river Tigris. The Sunni majority city, once inhabiting around 2.5 million people, a number that has gone down to 1.5 million has been extremely contemptuous about the Shia dominated Iraqi government and what it perceives as its ‘unethical’ armed forces.

Mosul gained prominence in June 2014 as it was in the ‘Grand al-Nuri Mosque’ within the city that the self-proclaimed leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi pronounced the creation of a ‘Caliphate’ encompassing Iraq and Syria and proclaimed himself as the ‘Caliph’. The 12th century mosque, whose fabled leaning minaret had been embellished with the black flag of the Islamic State since June 2014, was an emblem of supremacy for the jihadists. The Islamic State reigned over the city exercising power in a ruthless manner since then and swiftly extended its influence beyond the confines of the city. Mosul was the Islamic State’s most significant citadel along with Raqqa in Syria, its self-proclaimed capital. It was prominently highlighted in its propaganda videos, many of which were captured duplicating the form of television news reports. The evolution of the Islamic State can be traced to the al-Qaeda in Iraq which was overpowered by the U.S. troops and Sunni guerrillas in an operation that was known as the ‘Awakening’ in 2007. The Islamic State was able to spread to Syria in 2013, which war under the grip of a civil war, enticing combatants from Chechnya, Afghanistan, North Africa and Europe. The rebels under the banner of the Islamic State depicted themselves as the protectors and custodians of the Sunni Arabs who felt estranged from the Shia led government and at the same time took advantage of the sloppy military performance of the Iraqi troops. They took over Mosul in no time and moved towards Baghdad in the summer of 2014 prompting apprehensions of the country’s disintegration as ethnic and sectarian strains intensified.

The Islamic State

The Islamic State continues to exemplify a global menace with a pervasive ideological appeal magnified by the use of online mechanisms to augment its influence, in the process encroaching on borders. The manifold changes in the name of the organization in a way is emblematic of this spread and the related implications within. Its precursor, Jama’at al Tawhid wal Jihad (JTJ) or “The Group of Unification and Jihad,” was established in 1999.It became Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidain or “The Organization of the Base [al-Qai’da] of Jihad in the Land of the Two Rivers,” (Mesopotamia, contemporary Iraq) indicating the group’s fusion with Al-Qaida in 2004, which came to be known as al-Qai’da in Iraq (AQI). Then came the new name “Islamic State of Iraq,” (ISI) connoting the Iraqi leadership. In 2013, the next name change took place, al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil-Iraq wal-Sham, the “Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria,” (ISIS). The existing name, Islamic State, (Arab acronym being Daesh) was devised in 2014, specifying a caliphate with no modern borders and boundaries. The immediate roots of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) can be sketched to the openings provided by the bitter civil wars that questioned the established state system and the borders formed by the Sykes-Picot Agreement of World War I. In other words, the Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq that arose as an upshot of the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and  the civil war that has overwhelmed Syria since 2011 and shows no sign of subsiding. Encouraged by al-Qaeda’s militant posture against apparent American dominance, a substantial section of Iraq’s then newly expelled Sunni Arabs formed al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) to recover the ground they had lost to the Shia-dominated government in Iraq, an aspect that is worth remembering because it this very section of disgruntled Sunnis (of Mosul and elsewhere) who were sympathetic to the elements of the Islamic State with regard to the perceived injustices committed by the Shia government of Iraq. Countless among them escaped from Mosul as the fighting intensified. They could very well constitute the residual elements of the Islamic state of Mosul (and elsewhere), looking for opportunity spaces to stage a comeback.

The Islamic State’s quasi-state has not been entirely demolished as yet and it does not seem to be happening in the near future. There can be no assurance that the Islamic State will not reclaim the cities that it has lost. It has happened in the past and can be replicated in the future. The geopolitical fissures in Middle East and North Africa, particularly in Iraq and Syria, which facilitated the emergence of the Islamic state in the first instance, continue to prevail unabated. Intrinsically, the Islamic State is in the nature of an insurgent group that has transmuted itself into a quasi-state. Since the quasi-state is being assaulted, the group can always go back to insurgency for its existence. History is evidence of the fact that it is almost impossible to completely wipe out such insurgent groups. Al-Qaeda being a case in point. It is now being argued that the Islamic State is intensifying its ‘asymmetric reach’ as the territorial component of the quasi-state is being assaulted. The Islamic State has by now converted itself into a ‘global notion’ with a global outreach and has succeeded in delegating its assignment of terror attacks to clusters and people who adhere to its viewpoint. Thus, it is contended that even if the nucleus of the Islamic State is demolished, the insurrection may endure. The ideology of the Islamic State continues to thrive. Nation-building and administration has given way to sustenance.

Repercussions and Resistance

The Islamic State, as an obvious expression of the yearning to establish centralized political rule over parts of multi-sectarian and multi-religious countries populated by Sunni Muslims, posits a direct challenge to the artificial borders created by the Skyes-Picot arrangement. It does so by espousing the semantic of ‘religious acceptability’ with a discourse of ‘anti-colonialism’. Irrespective of the historic correctness or inaccuracy of the Islamic State’s suppositions, its argument that the contemporary borders of the Middle East and North Africa need to be recreated is one that has found echoes in most of contemporary western commentary about the justifications for prolonged struggles in the region. The mandate period in the Middle East has left behind a complicated legacy, and it would be more accurate  to cognize the international borders as coming from a composite of Ottoman governmental policy, imperial power arrangements, indigenous beliefs, and colonial self-interest, with the repercussion of each of these factors being inconstant in nature conditional upon the border. Nevertheless, there have been extensive demands, especially with the escalating war in Syria, for re-envisioning and re –fashioning the borders in the Middle East so as to replicate existing political actualities. By evolving amid an unbelievable wave of regional uncertainty and by influencing and aggravating such circumstances, the Islamic State productively stretched its military capability, increased its transnational affiliation, and assimilated incomparable financial assets.

The way to destabilize the Islamic State’s enduring character, either as a proto-state or as an insurgent group is to decode the socio-political inadequacies within its maneuvering abilities. In the short term, the  local, regional and transnational community can espouse a sequence of strategies designed to undermine the Islamic State’s  monetary influence and capacity to sponsor and deliver governance as well as provide social services to the public; counter balance the Islamic State’s ability at military maneuvering and acquiring manpower; compilation of and response to intelligence reports linked with the Islamic State’s “senior leadership and military command and control structure”;countering the Islamic State’s  shrewd usage of social media for recruitment and pursuing policies to  put an end to  the existent civil war situation in both Syria and Iraq. At present, the Middle East and North Africa, extending across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and incorporating the border areas of southern Turkey and northern Jordan are in a flux with obvious consequences for adjacent as well as distant regions. Whereas the arming of the Syrian insurgency from middle-2011 has crucially contributed towards unsettling the region, it is the Islamic State whose origins can be associated primarily to the happenings in Iraq, has come to posit the most significant threat to its continuing stability. This unusually controlled; almost zealously rigid organization has evolved into a formidable threat to national, regional and global security. In essentially assuming al-Qaeda’s place as the recognized leader of transcontinental fanaticism, it continues to lure recruits from different parts of the world. The Islamic State did not arise from nothing and there was a method to its madness. Much of its(till recent) resurgence has been primarily as a result of the continuing Syrian civil war, but also due to the incompetence and gigantic fiascoes committed by the Iraqi government. Its achievements and unrelenting endurance was conserved by the ineffectiveness of regional governments and the United States to diagnose it as a cataclysmic risk until 2014. The likelihood for overwhelming the rebellious, frenzied threat are paramount when both the internal and external challenges to the Islamic State are exploited simultaneously. This will perhaps require a more commonsensical and understated method than that being presently employed by the international community. The preliminary as well as the long-term approach has to be based on the actual and obstinate nature of the menace posed by the Islamic State that in turn entails both urgent as well as a lasting attention. Make shift policies and volatile politics could in fact have a boomerang effect.

While the encounter at Mosul is a setback for the Islamic State and represents a significant step in the right direction as far as the international community is concerned, it’s real connotations in the long run remain uncertain. The recent attacks in Las Vegas, Barcelona and London seem to indicate a change in the spatial focus of the Islamic State rather than its obliteration. Though it could be argued that in itself implies a sign of desperation, a shift from the core to the periphery by the residual elements, on the other hand it could very well suggest the deeply entrenched and intensifying nature of its ideology that cannot be confined within borders.

Priya

7/10/2017