MILITARY & DEFENSE
What everyone is missing about ISIS ’
big week
ARMIN ROSEN MILITARY &
DEFENSE MAY. 23, 2015, 5:18 AM
ISIS has made alarming gains in Iraq and Syria over the past week.
On May 17, ISIS fighters took
Ramadi, a city just 70 west of Baghdad ,
after a battle in which the jihadist group advanced into the city behind a wave
of suicide bombers. Capturing Palmyra , a former
Assad regime bastion in Syria ,
proved easier, as a collapsing Syrian military essentially vacated the city in
the face of the ISIS advance.
And an 11-month US-led bombing
campaign hasn’t prevented ISIS from taking and
holding additional territory. This week, ISIS has looked formidable, while the US ’s strategy
has seemed particularly ineffective and aimless. On May 21st, reports began
circulating that ISIS controlled half of
Syrian territory.
But such claims about ISIS ’s degree of territorial control obscures how and why
the group has been successful so far — and how it might eventually be defeated.
ISIS doesn’t really “control” half of
Syria .
As these maps from the Institute
for the Study of War demonstrates, ISIS has a
sliver-shaped core of direct administrative control, insulated by hundreds of
square miles of desert where the jihadist group and other militant forces
maintain a degree of operational capability.
There are gradients of ISIS
control in Syria ,
and understanding them hints at how the group can be successfully countered.
“ISIS’s fighters are likely clustered in key defensible terrain,”
Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria
conflict analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told Business Insider.
Cafarella explained that ISIS focuses its efforts and manpower around the
populated and strategic areas along the Euphrates
river.
“There’s little actual human terrain in close proximity to ISIS in
eastern Syria that ISIS does not already control,” she said. “Beyond that is the vast Homs Desert ,
where ISIS has been able to operate with
impunity.
“But it’s too inhospitable for any military to decisively hold and of
low enough strategic value that is can’t be considered an exclusively
ISIS-governed area.”
As Cafarella says, the desert in
the east of the country is at least “maneuverable
terrain by really all military forces.”
The issue is that ISIS currently
has free reign there — the Assad regime, for instance, doesn’t have the on hte
ground intelligence, the capacity, of perhaps the willingness to discover and
then bomb ISIS convoys traveling across Syria ’s desert east.
“We still don’t have the ground partner necessary to contest ISIS-held
terrain inside of Syria
In Syria ,
ISIS has a small core area of control, a wider
area of operational freedom, and no real ground-level counter-force pressuring
the group.
What it doesn’t have is an
administrative entity that actually comprises half of the country’s territory.
In other areas, over-emphasis on ISIS ’s territorial control can have an even more
distorting impact on the group’s actual reach. In Libya ,
it’s been frequently reported that ISIS rules over territory, with The New York
Times reporting in March that ISIS had a
foothold in Sirte, along the Mediterranean coast. On May 21st, Reuters reported
that ISIS had captured the city.
In reality, ISIS doesn’t really
control any territory in Libya ,
or at least not in the same sense as in Iraq
and Syria .
“The places they’re said to be in control of are heavily contested,”
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies, told Business Insider. “It
hasn’t captured cities and imposed an administrative structure.”
The idea that ISIS has
territorial control in Libya
“directly feeds into ISIS
propaganda,” says Gartenstein-Ross. It shows that the “caliphate” has spread beyond Iraq
and Syria ,
and that he group can fight and hold territory far beyond its center of power.
An exaggerated sense of ISIS’s Libya
capabilities may have been part of what convinced the Nigerian jihadist group
Boko Haram to pledge allegiance to ISIS in
March.
Understanding the nature and
extent of ISIS’s territorial control is especially important amidst growing
criticism of the US ’s
strategy against the group. Gartentstein-Ross explained that ISIS
has adjusted its own battlefield approach, opting for small-scale attacks over
vulnerable large-scale mobilizations. Furthermore, the group is only opening
fronts against forces they are relatively certain they can defeat, like the
Iraqi military.
“They’re using smaller and more mobile units that are better at evading
the air campaign,” says Gartenstein-Ross.
ISIS’s tactics are adjusting to
the US ’s
now 11-month-old air campaign, but this doesn’t mean the group is invincible.
ISIS took Palmyra
because the Syrian regime fled, and it took Ramadi because the Iraqi Security
Forces aren’t a viable or a competent fighting force.
On the other hand, ISIS has an
apparent unwillingness to contest areas held by battle-hardened
Iranian-supported Shi’ite militia groups in both Iraq
and Syria ,
and has made little progress against Kurdish forces in either country.
So even as the group expands,
it’s clear that it isn’t on an inevitable victory march across Iraq and Syria .
“I don’t think their capability should be overstated vis a vis the full
range of their opponents,” says Gartenstein-Ross.
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