Global Comment

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The anti-climatic destruction of the Islamic State ‘caliphate’

A marine conducting a sweep

The Islamic State (IS) dominated headlines internationally after it swiftly conquered one-third of Iraq in the summer of 2014 and declared its self-styled caliphate. The group luridly showcased its atrocities when it first butchered up to 1,700 unarmed Iraqi cadets in Tikrit and then went on to subject the Yezidi minority of Sinjar to a campaign of genocide that continues to this day.

The U.S. subsequently assembled a coalition to defeat the group in both Iraq and Syria, where the group controlled a span of contiguous territory equal in size to the United Kingdom.

As writer James Snell recalled: “Very quickly, the military campaign against IS became the focus of world attention. And as that campaign reached its final stages in Iraq, many of the world’s finest conflict journalists – complete with a fair few chancers and opportunists – hurried to Mesopotamia to witness the end of something.”

That apt choice of words, “the end of something”, very succinctly encapsulates the feeling of the time.

Over the past few years, my friend Calvin Sweeney dedicated his spare time to assisting the Syrian Kurds and the Yezidi survivors by fundraising for medical support, recalling that he had hitherto pledged that if anything resembling Nazism were ever to reemerge he would do what he could to help stop it. Indeed, the term “never again”, used as it was after the Holocaust, seemed like it would lose all meaning were that tyrannical entity able to continue carrying out crimes against humanity with impunity.

It was against this backdrop that the war against IS took precedence in the minds of many. It’s also against this backdrop that IS’s rise will undoubtedly prove the most infamous event of this decade, eclipsing even the Syrian Civil War that killed many more, given the group’s cruel methods, genocidal ambitions and heinous war crimes, that it so eagerly disseminated through its depraved propaganda films rather than cover up or deny.

Simply put, IS was, and remains, an unequivocally evil adversary that simply had to be confronted and destroyed.

Despite all this, the successful destruction of the vast majority of the caliphate and reversion to its roots as a non-state terrorist organization felt somewhat anti-climatic. Over a year has passed since the group was forcibly removed from Mosul, where it declared its caliphate, and from its de-facto capital city Raqqa in neighbouring Syria. Large swathes of both of these cities remain in ruins as a result of the thousands of airstrikes used to rout IS in support of ground offensives by the Iraqi Army and Syrian Kurdish-led forces respectively.

Reports from conditions today in both cities are quite distressing.

A report from the United Nations Mine Action Service in Iraq reported that improvised explosive devices (IEDs) left by IS in Mosul “are everywhere – lethal needles placed in haystacks of uncleared rubble, some triggered by infrared sensors, some by tripwires.”

These “lethal needles” are concealed under “nearly seven millions tons worth” of debris which could take up to a decade and billions of dollars to effectively clear up. The report somberly notes that “the terror planted here by terrorists continues to stifle the economy and society in Iraq’s second city.”

The UN once went so far as to describe the offensive to remove IS from Mosul, waged from October 2016 to July 2017, as “the single largest urban battle since World War II.”

Raqqa, a much smaller city, was largely destroyed in the operation to clear IS, which ended in October 2017. This October NPR painted a dire picture of the current situation there.

“Once a place of green parks and a thriving middle class, it’s now common to see women and children scavenging Raqqa’s debris-strewn streets for scrap metal to sell,” NPR reported from the ground.

One Raqqa resident scoffed at the notion that this was a “liberation.”

“It’s destruction,” the resident said. “Systematic destruction. This is what people believe – my relatives, my friends, my neighbors. No one can change their minds. How can you expect them to feel free when their lives are destroyed?”

On top of all this, even though IS was forced from the city a year ago the residents living amongst the ruins don’t feel that much safer due to “near-daily bombings” as the city’s new Kurdish-led security forces struggle to combat IS sleeper cells who are still able to infiltrate the city and sow fear.

“The nightmare of ISIS follows us everywhere – whenever we try to rest, explosions start up again,” one Raqqa resident named Najla al-Ahmed recently told Asharq Al-Awsat. “The war has worn us out. Us and our children. It has destroyed our future.”

Reading such reports reminds one of George Orwell’s observations upon observing Germany’s bombed-out cities as World War II neared its end.

“The people of Britain have never felt easy about the bombing of civilians and no doubt they will be ready enough to pity the Germans as soon as they have definitely defeated them; but what they still have not grasped – thanks to their own comparative immunity – is the frightful destructiveness of modern war and the long period of impoverishment that now lies ahead of the world as a whole,” he wrote.

“To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization,” he added. Upon pondering “the stupendous task of rebuilding hundreds of European cities, one realizes that a long period must elapse before even the standards of living of 1939 can be re-established.”

In his conclusion, Orwell wrote that “it was less generally realized that the impoverishment of any one country reacts unfavourably on the world as a whole. It would be no advantage to turn Germany into a kind of rural slum.”

Such observations could, albeit on a much smaller scale, describe the dire conditions that still afflict the territories formerly under the caliphate. As with the defeat of Nazism, none of this fundamentally negates the necessity of waging war to destroy the Islamic State, since the prolonged existence of that entity would doubtlessly have been a far worse outcome for the people of the region. Nevertheless, if the dire conditions created by this war are permitted to persist in the coming years then this already anti-climatic victory will be further tarnished in retrospect.

Enormous numbers of bombs, bullets and shells were needed to fulfill the essential destruction of the Nazi empire. Then the post-war Marshall Plan secured a future for Europe and spearheaded that “stupendous task of rebuilding hundreds of European cities.”

Today, similar action needs to be taken to ensure the victory of this essential war is not short-lived.

Photo: DVIDSHUB