Small Wars Journal

Why Is Islamic State So Hard to Beat?

Thu, 01/07/2016 - 3:39pm

Why Is Islamic State So Hard to Beat?

Sharon Behn, Voice of America

Islamic State extremists have been bombed, strafed, derided and pushed back, yet they fight on.

“For ISIS, in very plain English, they don’t give a s--- (don't care),” said Cyril Widdershoven, a Middle East and North Africa security specialist based in the Netherlands.

With a fighting force of anywhere between 25,000 to 60,000, Islamic State militants control millions of people, thousands of square kilometers of land, and terrorize the world.

More than 9,000 punishing airstrikes, reams of satellite imagery and a plethora of local and international military forces on the ground have yet to have significant effect.

Even the victory of Iraqi forces in Ramadi, an IS-held city west of Baghdad, does not appear to have crippled the extremist group. Instead, they turned their considerable force to another city, Haditha.

Why is the group so hard to defeat?

Unconventional Tactics

The problem, said Widdershoven, is the United States, European and Iraqi forces continue to think of IS as a conventional military focused on holding ground.

“That is the old fashioned approach: you take one city after another. For ISIS, in their overall strategy, they don’t feel as if they are losing. They see it as ‘OK, you want A, you can have A; we will go for B, and if you want B, C, or D, we will attack where you are not’.”

Islamic State commanders have excelled at gaming strategies out, and turning battlefield losses to their advantage, analysts say.

“They are human; they will take losses. That is all part of the game,” said Kamran Bokhari, a Middle East and Countering Violent Extremism expert at the University of Ottawa.

“But when they get hit, do they become incoherent, or are we looking at an orderly retreat? I think it is an orderly retreat,” Bokhari told VOA. “This is not a demoralized force that is defeated.”

Learn From Mistakes

IS learned from its predecessors. The group evolved out of and built on the lessons of al Qaida in Iraq, the experience of officers from Saddam Hussein’s army and international fighters hardened in places like Chechnya.

It operates on multiple levels, explained David Kilcullen, a strategy and counterinsurgency expert with Caerus Associates.

It has a central state-like element, a provincial structure and an international layer of individual players.

As a result, even if it has ceased to expand territorially, because of this triple-layer structure it has been able to move fluidly between layers, sometimes responding on one while counteracting at another.

“It makes it extraordinarily resilient,” Kilcullen said at a recent conference organized by the Jamestown Foundation.

Kilcullen said IS tactics also have made it extremely difficult to quash.

It uses one-way, broadcast–based, open communications that create a lot of background clutter that intelligence agencies have to dig through. It uses a model of revolutionary terrorism, with knowledge crossing borders and teams being built close to a target. It uses remote radicalization through technology, enabling the threat to spread. It attacks in urban settings.

And it is poised to use the backlash against the migration crisis in Europe to provoke a cycle of retaliation.

US Strategy

The U.S. led coalition has said it is battling IS on all levels by pursuing its leadership, shrinking its safe havens, countering its financing, and puncturing its powerful idealistic narrative of a revival of a “true” caliphate.

The coalition has increased attacks against the group, blowing up oil trucks, striking fighting positions, and taking out IS leaders and operations planners.
According to coalition spokesman Colonel Steve Warren, IS today controls 40 percent less territory that it once held.

Yan St. Pierre, a counterterrorism expert for MOSECON, a security consulting company based in Berlin, agreed there have been some gains. But he cautioned against declaring any kind of victory.

“It sounds as if you are putting a dent in their armor, but they adapt. They might have some problems for three, six weeks, a few months, but they will adapt,” St. Pierre told VOA.

All aspects of IS, military, social, propaganda, have to be tackled simultaneously, he said. “If you focus on the myth, they can rebuild it. If you focus on the military, the myth will allow them to rise again and rebuild the military.”

“As long as that myth is alive, there are not enough bombs to destroy IS,” St. Pierre said, adding that as yet there are no credible, functional alternatives, and no credible unifying leaders to counter the group either in Iraq or Syria.

St. Pierre warns IS is also developing fallback positions. “They are progressively getting more and more involved in Libya, Yemen, Somalia. They are trying to build bridges that become areas they can develop.”

Solutions

Analysts differ on a solution, with some suggesting that Arab Sunni boots on the ground, such as an alliance of nations including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE, is the only option.

But most agree with CIA veteran Bruce Riedel’s view that “there is a short path to catastrophic defeat in the war against al Qaida and ISIS, and that path is to make this a battle between the West and Islam.”

Comments

Outlaw 09

Sun, 01/10/2016 - 2:43am

Again indications of Iranian non linear warfare UW hard at work....and largely ignored in US MSM and the WH/Obama in their drive for the Iran Deal....would have believed it possible that the "legacy drive of an outgoing US President" would be the key driver of US FP.....

Iraq faces take-over by Iran-backed militias if Islamic State is defeated, coalition commanders fear via @Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/12089119/Iraq-f…

US MSM and the Obama WH has evidently also overlooked that right now inside Syria there are a total of 30 Iraqi Shia militias fighting for Assad and against the anti Assad forces....instead of fighting inside Iraq against IS and receiving RuAF ground support as well.

Outlaw 09

Sat, 01/09/2016 - 7:03am

Still have never read and or heard any US General active and or retired claim that Islamic State is an "existential threat to the US"...there are other nation state UW actors in this current reality of foreign affairs that are far more dangerous to the US than is IS...the core problem is most of our politicians cannot come off of 9/11 and see the real world around them.

A Putin that threatens to turn the US to dust in 30 minutes during a dinner and who has the abilities to deliver on that threat AND who has repeated that nuclear threat more than a few times in the last 18 months is far more dangerous that a few AK47 totting jihadi's running amok in Paris as bad as that was.

The last time I checked al Baghdadi and the entire IS still have no nuclear weapons nor does he have the capacity to invade any Eastern/Central European nation state.

Time to get real and realize the ever changing face of the ME will not be in the next five years what it was for the last 70 years and it is time to fully understand the Sunni Shia clash that has been at work since we so nicely threw out Saddam and created this mess....BUT WAIT this Sunni Shia clash has been in progress long before Saddam.

Robert C. Jones

Fri, 01/08/2016 - 1:30pm

I'm sorry, but this is the same type of thinking that brought us here. Cling to the same tired theories of the nature of the "threat," and then shuffle tactics and hope for a better strategic result.

We keep doing this, and it is not working.

First, stop exaggerating the degree of threat ISIS is to the US. Will they probably attack us? Yes. Just like I will probably get a ding in the door of my car at the grocery store some time this year. Just because something is likely to happen that I don't want to happen does not mean it is something that is a major threat. Stop exaggerating. The President is spot on in that regard.

Second, focus on the problem, not the symptoms. The problems are two-fold. We set in motion the frozen conflict of Shia-Sunni competition by taking out Saddam's Iraq and replacing it with an Iranian influenced, Shia dominated regime; and the character of our solution for Iraq left the Sunni populations of Syria and Iraq in an extremely vulnerable position in this new Shia belt of Iranian influence we effectively helped extend from the Hindu Kush to the Med. ISIS is just a symptom, a parasite that reasonably emerged to exploit the conditions WE created.

Third, counter their strategy, not their tactics. ISIS is a de facto weak state waging a UW campaign. All we need to do to render them moot is to address the two big problems identified above; and work to outcompete them for influence with the many disparate pockets of disenfranchised or oppressed Sunni populations around the Greater Middle East, Asia and Europe. Disrupt their UW campaign.

Fourth, not every insurgent group that works with ISIS or AQ becomes ISIS or AQ merely by the fact of that relationship. We conflated for ease of targeting and it is a strategic disaster. We must disaggregate by how these movements are strategically unique, not bundle by how they are tactically similar - and then tailor our approaches to each accordingly. BL is that it is neither our job or in our interest to go around the world waging CT against the revolutionary populations and organizations of our partners and allies. This is why a Counter-UW strategy is superior to a CT strategy. CT is reactive tactics, and tends to make the strategic conditions worse.

Fifth, focus on the big picture. The economic and military power of the globe has shifted and concentrated to Asia. While we stomp around the Middle East like a cartoon elephant going after a mouse, the far east is preparing to blow up in a way that can truly hurt us.

Lastly, to defeat ISIS will serve primarily to re-empower AQ and fragment a weak, little land-locked "Caliphate" state back into a dynamic chaos of violently competing insurgencies. We have already won and we are too self-absorbed to notice.