A host of forces including Turkish and Iranian proxies to Russian troops and Syrian government forces are jockeying for control of the lands that once were held by the Islamic State.
Seth J. Frantzman December 4, 2019, 6:47 AM
The collapse of the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate and the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were symbolically important. His death bookends a five-year effort to defeat the Islamic State that involved more than 70 countries and comes amid a U.S. withdrawal from parts of Syria. The United States remains in other areas of eastern Syria in Deir Ezzor and Hasakah provinces, where it is keeping Islamic State sleeper cells on the run.
However, the slow defeat of the group has left a vacuum in Iraq and Syria; areas once controlled by the group have been filled by forces linked to Iran, Turkey, the United States, and Russia. New conflicts are emerging, including the protests in Iraq and Turkey’s invasion of Syria. A conflict between Israel and Iranian proxies, such as Hezbollah, could even be unleashed. This is bad news for average people seeking to recover from the depredations of the Islamic State.
It is a cliché that countries sometimes win the war but lose the peace. However, in Syria and Iraq, it is true. The Islamic State once occupied an area the size of Britain, and the war against it made millions of people refugees and led to the destruction of cities and the disappearance of thousands in the carnage. For instance, 3,000 Yazidis, members of a minority group in Iraq targeted by the Islamic State in 2014, are still missing. There are hundreds of mass graves scattered across Iraq and Syria, with forensics teams only beginning now to identify remains. The sudden U.S. decision to leave parts of northern Syria that the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had liberated has now enabled a Turkish invasion that forced an estimated 200,000 people from their homes. Worse may be yet to come.
On a recent trip to northern Iraq in September, I met with refugees. Yazidis still sitting in barren tents near Dohuk said they could not go home because areas in their home villages around Mount Sinjar were festooned with armed checkpoints. Some of these are run by the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), a group of mostly Shiite militias that is now an official arm of the Iraqi security forces. These same units have been accused of killing protesters in other parts of Iraq in October.
Turkey has carried out airstrikes in Sinjar, alleging that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is present there. In northern Iraq, the Islamic State still exists in various forms, slipping in and out of villages south of Mosul and exploiting the lack of coordination between the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government and Iraqi federal forces. The overlapping military forces create a sense of insecurity, as opposed to the security that Iraq seems to think it has achieved since militarily defeating the Islamic State.
The feeling one gets from speaking to people impacted by the war against the Islamic State is that from Raqqa in Syria to Mosul in Iraq, a distance of 230 miles, a gaping wound remains that may not be easily healed. The advance of different forces, such as Turkish-backed Syrian rebels near Tal Abyad in Syria and U.S. repositioning to secure oil fields near Deir Ezzor, neglects local communities, representing a competition for land, power, and resources.
The post-Baghdadi period should be seen as a series of interconnected events and conflicts that emerged after the setbacks the Islamic State faced in 2017. This list includes the Kurdistan Regional Government’s referendum in September 2017; the attempted attack on SDF-held oil fields by Syrian regime-backed Russian contractors in February 2018; the threats by Turkey to invade eastern Syria and its eventual attack on the SDF in October 2019; a series of mortar and rocket attacks near U.S. facilities in Iraq allegedly carried out by pro-Iranian elements; and the airstrikes attributed to Israel that were carried out in Syria and Iraq against Iranian-linked facilities.
The conflicts in Syria and Iraq appeared to be winding down between 2017 and 2019 as Russia, Turkey, and Iran met frequently as part of the Astana process and agreed to areas of control and influence in Syria and Iraq that kept an Islamic State resurgence in check. But the forces unleashed over years of war in Iraq and Syria have now come back to haunt almost everyone. The PMU in Iraq is infiltrated by groups that work closely with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Formed to fight the Islamic State after a fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in 2014, it has led the recent crackdown on protesters, and its political leaders want the U.S. presence in Iraq to end. Syrian rebel factions have been shoehorned by Turkey into a Syrian National Army (SNA) now being used to fight Kurdish forces. The SNA is accused of widespread human rights abuses in areas Turkey helped it control.
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