Revolt could trigger overthrow of ISIS

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A big offensive to dislodge Islamic State from the territories under its control will require a revolt by Sunni, secular and other forces, the co-author of an authoritative report on the jihadist movement told Rudaw.

Robert McFadden, a former US counter-intelligence official, said there had to be an eventual backlash against the “forced marriages and other draconian measures” imposed on the roughly 6 million people living under ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

But it would take time to co-opt enough popular support against ISIS and to plan for any offensive. This was unlikely to develop sufficiently before next spring, when the US is reportedly planning a military push against ISIS, he said.

“There could be resistance if ISIS goes all in and tries, for example, to make the tribes pledge support for [Abu Bakr Al] Baghdadi [the self-proclaimed caliph of Islamic State],” McFadden said in a telephone interview.

“It will be interesting to see if, with time, the tribes living under ISIS do have some kind of ‘awakening’,” he said, referring to the Iraqi Sunni uprising of 2005 to 2007 when tribal militias fought against Al Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIS.

The report, The Islamic State, was published last week by the Soufan Group, a US-based security and intelligence company. It outlines in detail the leadership, structure, operations, financing and media strategy of the militant group.

The report describes a “marriage of convenience” between former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and ISIS. Despite a deep philosophical divide, the two sides have found “sufficient coincidence of interest to overcome any ideological disagreement.”

While the US was unlikely to repeat its issue of a deck of cards showing the most-wanted Iraqis after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the US would be targeting the ISIS leadership. “The US has said clearly that ISIS is a threat to its national interest in the Middle East,” McFadden said.

The Soufan report says killing ISIS’s small cadre of skilled military tacticians could halt the group’s advance because many of the foot soldiers are amateurs. Targeted killing could also lessen the group’s attractiveness to foreign fighters, estimated by a United Nations Security Council report to number around 15,000.

The number of ISIS fighters could number more than 30,000 fighters, who are said to receive between $200 and $600 a month, Soufan said.

Preparation for a big anti-ISIS operation will include the training of Kurdish Peshmerga, which will take time, McFadden said.

“As a fighting force, the Peshmerga were defensive for many years and never had to fight to take or to retake territory from such a formidable enemy as ISIS,” he said. “So there has to be a significant transition and we’ll see how it plays out.”

Much political wrangling between Erbil, Ankara and Washington was expended in recent weeks to send Iraqi Peshmerga to defend Kobane, the Syrian town near the Turkish border besieged by ISIS.

Meanwhile, ISIS has managed to take control of up to 80 per cent of Iraq’s western Anbar province and massacred hundreds of members of Sunni tribes that had been fighting it.

In the long-term, ISIS could be defeated militarily but governments in the Middle East had to reform to end the lure of extremism. A mixture of “cerebral and kinetic” approaches were needed to show that Muslims had other alternatives, said McFadden.

“[ISIS] will be no more able to harness the social, economic and political forces around it than were the states that, through their failure, allowed the space for the Islamic State to grow,” the Soufan report said. “The thirst for change that the Islamic State has managed to exploit will not be slaked by its totalitarian approach towards its subjects.”