Over the last eighteen months the territory ISIL controls in Iraq and Syria has shrunk significantly. The Kurds have driven its forces out of most of their autonomous region. The Iraqi army, despite egregious corruption and a dearth of fighting spirit, has retaken Tikrit and is encircling Ramadi.
ISIL, and Islamist militancy in general, nonetheless have alternate paths to expansion than trying to conquer sparsely populated expanses in Mesopotamia.
Secessionist movements
Most countries from North Africa to Central Asia have failed to become coherent nation-states. This may be attributable to European carve-ups of the region, Bolshevik efforts to create pliant autonomous republics, or the failures of corrupt and brutal strongmen.
Whatever the cause, the region confronts several movements fighting for autonomy or independence. Islamist militant groups thrive in these areas and ally, if uneasily, with local guerrillas.
Yemen has always been divided by a Shia north shaped by Ottoman rule and a Sunni south long under British authority. Civil wars have recurred, peaces were short-lived. A new civil war is underway and both al Qaeda and ISIL have intertwined with some Sunni tribes.
Many North African states have a Muslim north and a non-Muslim south. Conflicts centering on revenue sharing stretch from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Islamist groups have aided Tuareg secessionists in Mali. The Nigerian group Boko Haram established itself as a regional rebellion against the Christian south, spread into adjacent countries, and now flies the black flag of ISIL.
Egypt, for all its national institutions, has never adequately incorporated tribes in the west, south, and east into the country. The tribes simmer in the south and west, they are in full revolt in Sinai. ISIL and al Qaeda fight with the bedouins of Sinai and welcome recruits from the now outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.
Urban landscapes
The fighters who went to war in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya were chiefly from Middle Eastern cities, enjoyed middle-class backgrounds, and attained above average educations. Religiosity was not especially pronounced, though some became more pious during their wars. And of course their piety and daring as well only grew in the retelling over the years. A yearning for adventure figures highly in accounts of their decisions to go to war.
Many fighters with ISIL today are from similar backgrounds, though there is an increasingly pronounced segment from the urban poor, often from European rather than Middle Eastern cities. Assimilation is minimal, alienation almost total. Religiosity is less pronounced or even almost absent. (A Parisian belt bomber is said to have never opened the Koran.) What religiosity there is intermingles freely with resentfulness and vengefulness.
Cities of Western Europe come readily to mind so soon after the Paris attacks. Many Muslims live in isolated housing projects and ghettoes. Petty crime and hip-hop life become ennobled by the call to jihad. However, there are dense urban centers in the Islamic world that also contain violent lawless subcultures, and stretch from Cairo to Karachi.
Many urban volunteers lack the discipline to serve in regular fighting units of ISIL, which for all their brutality nonetheless display remarkable discipline and cohesion. They may be better suited to lone wolf attacks and suicide raids such as the ones in Mumbai and Paris.
Dozens of these urban neighborhoods may one day become ISIL enclaves which police and security forces diligently avoid. Indeed, this is already the case in Benghazi and Karachi.
Defenders of the Sunni faith
With sectarian violence reaching levels unmatched in centuries, and with the authority of central governments in steep decline, ISIL and al Qaeda may present themselves as defending local Sunnis from Shia oppressors.
This may be especially true in western Iraq, where Sunnis resent their loss of power in 2003, and in eastern Syria, where Sunnis are waging a stalemate against the Shia-Alawi army and Hisbollah militias. War-weariness may figure in local support for Islamist militancy – better a harsh government than none at all. Hobbes awaits his Arabic translator.
Islamist groups, though having a more grandiose goal than being local warlords, may accept this limited role for the time being. They have unmistakably lost momentum and even steadily lost territory over the last year. They may accept temporary consolidation in a base camp before renewing their offensive.
Armies
The West is fighting ISIL with airstrikes, arms, and training missions. The expectation is that regional armies will defeat the Islamists on the ground. Thus far the expectation has not worked out. Many soldiers expected to defeat ISIL may be receptive to its call.
Despite lavish expenditures and foreign training programs, Middle Eastern armies have not fared well in battle. Senior leaders are unqualified. They owe their august positions less to qualifications than to connections. Nepotism trumps professionalism. Meanwhile, subordinates who have demonstrated qualifications are passed over.
The rank and file mistrust not only senior officers, but also fellow soldiers. They come from antagonistic tribes and clans and have never gelled into a unified fighting body as social scientists hoped decades ago.
Aware of the limitations, regional princes are reluctant to use them in combat. They fear the impact of casualties on the public and within the army. And why embark on a risky program of reform when foreign armies can be cajoled into fighting their battles.
Resentments are exacerbated by the yawning gap between folklore and propaganda of great military feats and a century or more of failure against European powers, Israel, the United States, and India – with the noteworthy exceptions of irregular forces in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and now Iraq and Syria.
ISIL presents itself as dedicated to overthrowing old regimes in the Islamic world – kings, presidents, and generals. Its Salafist creed transcends tribal pettiness and seeks to unite the faithful. Most importantly, ISIL has achieved something that regime armies have promised, paid for, but never presented – the glory of victory.
Princes would do well to ponder the potential for a military putsch or large-scale desertions to ISIL or garrisons in revolt, and ask the question from Antiquity, “Who will guard the guardians?” Western powers should ask the same, as many princes expect foreign armies to be their guardians of last resort.
©2015 Brian M Downing