After Losses in Syria and Iraq, ISIS Moves the Goal Posts
By Anne Barnard, NY Times, Oct. 18, 2016
BEIRUT, Lebanon--Islamic State leaders had long promised their followers an apocalyptic battle--foretold, some believe, by the Prophet Muhammad--in an otherwise nondescript village they controlled in northern Syria.
But the warriors of the self-declared caliphate lost the village, Dabiq, in just a few hours over the weekend as Syrian rebels, backed by Turkey, closed in. To soften the symbolic blow, the Islamic State switched rhetorical gears, declaring that the real Dabiq battle would come some other time.
The about-face was part of a larger repositioning as the Islamic State loses ground, not only in Syria but also in Iraq, where forces backed by the United States began a drive on Monday to oust the group from the sprawling and strategically vital city of Mosul. On the defensive in both countries, the group has been making preparations for retrenchment and survival.
Hundreds of Islamic State fighters and their families have fled to the group’s de facto capital, the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, in recent days, according to several residents of that city who asked not to be named to avoid reprisals. They said that the arrivals had come from Mosul, as well as from areas around Dabiq in the Syrian province of Aleppo, and that they were waiting for the Islamic State authorities to find them housing.
The group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has also been laying the ideological groundwork to maintain its appeal in straitened circumstances. As it suffered on the battlefield in recent months, the group began signaling that a drastic contraction or even a failure of its territorial proto-state would not spell defeat.
“The generation that has lived in the shadow of the caliphate, or has lived during its great battles, will be able--God willing--to keep its banner aloft,” the group’s weekly Arabic-language newsletter, Al Naba, said in June.
The article reminded followers that the group’s predecessor, the Islamic State in Iraq, had survived by fading into the desert after military defeat during the United States occupation, only to re-emerge more formidably in Syria years later and eventually seize much of Iraq, including Mosul.
With the recapture of Dabiq and other recent indications that the group is weakening or retreating, a constellation of forces involved in Syria--including the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Syrian government, Syrian rebels and Kurdish militias--are jockeying for dominance.
Many enemies of the Islamic State are also enemies of one another. They accuse one another of using the group as a weapon, of effectively allying with it, and of driving its fighters into enemy territory to be someone else’s headache. They are also racing one another to win ground from the group.
Whoever seizes what is now Islamic State territory will control the border between Iraq and Syria, as well as fault lines between Kurdish groups seeking autonomy and populations that oppose them.
For instance, the seizing of Dabiq and other towns by Turkish-backed Syrian rebels has sharpened tensions with Kurdish militias. The Kurds wanted to take the area from the Islamic State to unite two separate Kurdish enclaves; blocking them was a main aim of the Turks, who consider the Syrian Kurds allies of a Kurdish insurgency on Turkish soil.
And as the Mosul battle heated up on Tuesday, there was talk of a higher-stakes race to Raqqa, with the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, saying that the United States-led coalition should push on to that city next.
Meanwhile, the Syrian government--on state news media and in conversations with several foreign diplomats--has accused the United States of targeting Syrian soldiers with airstrikes to open routes for Islamic State fighters to escape into Syria from Mosul.
The United States-led coalition killed scores of Syrian soldiers in a bombing raid last month that American officials described as an accident. But Syrian and Russian officials say the attack, in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, was deliberate, noting that it went on for nearly an hour and hit a long-established, clearly marked base.
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and his backers also disagree about how to handle the Islamic State. Mr. Assad has long vowed to retake the whole country, including Raqqa and Deir al-Zour, but Russia has been loath to spend resources on Syria’s eastern desert provinces bordering Iraq, focusing instead on the more heavily populated spine of cities in the west. Iran, the Syrian government’s closest ally, has more reason to oust the Islamic State from Sunni areas straddling the border between Syria and Iraq, a country where Iran is deeply enmeshed and influential.
