Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Islamic State

  • Why There Is So Little Attention for the Islamic State’s Defeat

    David French wonders why the defeat of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (or ISIS) isn’t a bigger story.

    Remember how debates about ISIS dominated the presidential primaries? Remember how Donald Trump and Ted Cruz ratcheted up their rhetoric until they both seemed to promise that they’d commit warcrimes, like carpet bombing and torture, to defeat the deadly threat? ISIS was often the most important and most prominent story in the world.

    Now that the wannabe caliphate lies in ruins, though, Americans no longer care. (more…)

  • Trump Doesn’t Deserve Credit for Defeating the Islamic State

    Donald Trump Emmanuel Macron
    Presidents Donald Trump of the United States and Emmanuel Macron of France inspect an honor guard in Paris, July 13 (Elysée/Soazig de la Moissonniere)

    Donald Trump wants credit for defeating the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

    In a radio interview, the American said he “totally changed the attitudes of the military” after taking over as president from Barack Obama in January.

    “We weren’t fighting to win,” he said of the Obama era. “We were fighting to be politically correct.”

    Asked why the caliphate is now giving up, the president said, “Because you didn’t have Trump as your president. I mean, it was a big difference.”

    Sure. (more…)

  • After Caliphate’s Fall, A Spending Challenge

    Since Iraqi troops seized back Mosul last month, the self-proclaimed Islamic State has been reduced to the area around Raqqa in Syria. Predominantly Kurdish forces are attempting to take the city, protected by Western airpower. Authorities estimate the number of Islamist fighters has dwindled from the thousands to the hundreds.

    As soon as the caliphate falls, governments will face another challenge: the reconstruction. (more…)

  • Dark Side to Coalition’s Success Against Islamic State

    The Western-backed effort to drive the Islamic State out of Iraq is making headway. The self-proclaimed caliphate has lost two-thirds of its territory. The battle for Mosul, Iraq’s second city, is well underway.

    But there is a dark side to the coalition’s success in Iraq. We’ve seen it in the streets of Paris, Nice and London: The more the Islamic State is cornered, the more of its sympathizers commit terrorist attacks in the West.

    Gilles de Kerchove, the EU’s counterterrorism coordinator, has warned that as Islamic State leaders are killed and the group loses territory in the Middle East, it could take the fight to Western Europe.

    Returning jihadists, who are estimated to number in the thousands, pose a particular threat. Not all plan to commit attacks upon returning, but the risk that they do is substantial and more fighters could return in the coming months as the Islamic State is reduced. (more…)

  • Trump Seems to Realize Assad Is No Ally Against Islamic State

    It appears to have dawned on Donald Trump that a pact with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad against the Islamists in his country makes no sense.

    “It’s very, very possible, and, I will tell you, it’s already happened, that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much,” the American president told reporters in Washington after it emerged that Assad’s troops had again deployed chemical weapons.

    As recently as last week, Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, appeared to soften America’s position, saying Assad’s future “will be decided by the Syrian people”.

    Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, famously declared Assad “must go”.

    During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump told The New York Times he saw the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as a bigger threat than Assad.

    He also repeatedly counseled against American military intervention in Syria. (Which didn’t stop him from blaming the absence of military intervention under Obama for the most recent chemical weapons attack.) (more…)

  • Trump’s Plan to Defeat Islamists Looks a Lot Like Obama’s

    Remember Donald Trump’s secret plan to defeat the Islamic State?

    During last year’s presidential campaign, the Republican said he knew how to defeat the caliphate. Indeed, he knew better than the generals.

    Trump wouldn’t tell us what his plan was. That could tip off the enemy, he said.

    In reality, he never had a plan. As soon as he was elected, Trump’s secret plan became a request to the Pentagon for an updated strategy.

    Now the same generals who, according to Trump, didn’t know what they were doing have come back and recommended not to change the strategy. (more…)

  • Syria’s Endgame

    It has taken at least 400,000 dead and over ten million internally and externally displaced Syrians, but we are finally coming to the end game of the Syrian Civil War.

    Last week, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan blithely announced in a news conference that Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State, would be the final target of the Turkish invasion.

    Today, Pentagon sources leaked that the United States might send large combat forces into Syria.

    This comes on the heels of talks between Iran, Turkey and Russia aimed at ending the conflict.

    At long last, a confluence of interest is emerging that is the beginning of the end of the Syrian Civil War. (more…)

  • Defeat in Mosul Will Not Eliminate the Islamic State

    As David Downing reported here on Sunday, Mosul could make a quick economic recovery once it is entirely liberated from the self-declared Islamic State by Iraqi government forces.

    Not only is the city, once Iraq’s second largest, a hub for northern Iraqi industry and trade; it’s also situated close to major oil and natural gas reserves. The potential for further economic expansion could be close at hand.

    The battle will not be over quickly, though. It has been estimated it will take another three to five months to rout the Islamic State from eastern Mosul.

    Once the militants are defeated, internal and sectarian divisions could resurface. A Shia-Sunni divide seems inevitable. Mosul being a Sunni majority town doesn’t help the cause for peaceful settlement. Friction between religious groups can hurt reconstruction efforts, especially with the involvement of Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi’s sanctioned Shia fighters. We are looking at a “game of thrones” mentality where a balance of factions in this enclave becomes quite a task. (more…)

  • Joining Assad and Russia Against Islamic State Is Foolish

    One of Donald Trump’s most foolish foreign-policy proposals is to team up with Iran, Russia and Bashar al-Assad to defeat the Islamic State in Syria.

    “I don’t like Assad at all, but Assad is killing ISIS,” the American president-elect said last month, referring to the self-proclaimed Islamic State by an acronym.

    “Russia is killing ISIS and Iran is killing ISIS.”

    If that were true, a pact might make sense. But it isn’t. And even if it were, the arguments are against an alliance. (more…)

  • After Mosul Falls, What Then?

    There are some 100,000 troops involved in the conquest (or reconquest, depending on your perspective) of Mosul. On the surface, the battle is meant to restore the Iraqi government to its full writ; a Baghdad-united Shia and Sunni realm, a nation state on the way to functionality. In other words, a normal country.

    Ah, dreams.

    Careful observation reveals a more wretched future. The Islamic State may be doomed, but that hardly means peace for Iraq. There are too many who want a piece of this particular pie.

    Many players there are. Let’s start with the greatest of powers, who define the broadest outlines of geopolitics in the Middle East. (more…)

  • The Islamic State Works, But That’s No Reason for Peace

    It’s hard to be fair to totalitarians. The vast majority of us English-reading folks have no concept of totalitarian systems beyond the hard-jawed stereotypes of Nazi movie villains, Thought Police boogeymen of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Kim Jong-un-like buffoonery. We take for granted the innate moral superiority of our systems so often that we rarely think about the reality of daily life under a dictator or a would-be caliph. When we do think about it, we resort to the lazy caricatures utilized in any story that needs a bad guy.

    The fall of Sirte in Libya has pushed the Islamic State out of its would-be African capital and revealed much of what life is like under their rule. The intense interest in the group has given us glimpses into its daily life. And there is an uncomfortable truth within it: by many metrics, the Islamic State works. (more…)

  • Staying Rational in the Wake of Orlando

    A highly individualistic culture like the United States lends itself quite readily to bursts of emotion; citizens feel compelled, rightly or wrongly, to show that they feel as much as anyone else, if not more.

    In the wake of the massacre in Orlando, this pattern reasserts itself once again in America.

    But succumbing to anger or depression or any extreme emotion while trying to decide on policy is always a mistake. Here’s how to stay rational — and support good geopolitical decisions — in the wake of murder. (more…)

  • NATO Could Destroy Islamic State So Why Don’t They?

    Italian F-16 fighter jet
    An Italian F-16 fighter jet prepares to take off from Decimomannu Air Base, Sardinia, November 3, 2011 (IDF)

    NATO is the most powerful military alliance in human history: it combines three of the world’s seven nuclear-armed powers and tops it off with the conventional power of the world’s lone superpower. It has potentially formidable military powers within it: France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom could all well rearm to much success should they so choose.

    And the Islamic State just set off bombs right near their headquarters.

    A wholly reasonable and often asked question will be: Why doesn’t NATO do something? Why, when so powerful and so unassailable, doesn’t the mighty military alliance annihilate the Islamic State?

    This article is intended to help frame those conversations as friends, family and Facebook randoms begin asking just that. (more…)

  • Modest Proposal to End Syria’s Civil War, Destroy Islamic State

    And modest, of course, it will be, involving cooperation on a scale not seen since World War II. But to genuinely destroy the Islamic State and end the regional crisis that fuels it, one must think big.

    Diplomacy has been tried in the past, but diplomacy tends to fail when equally matched powers are unwilling to give ground. For all intents and purposes, every force within the Middle East is capable only of influencing and protecting portions of the region; even the United States has proven unable to impose a solution. This has produced a stalemate and between the partitioned spheres of influence these outside forces have left no man’s lands. Within those no man’s lands, predictably, the madmen are king.

    Now, in the wake of Paris and the downing of a Russian airliner, geopolitical forces are converging that may well make international cooperation possible. (more…)

  • Why the Hell Would ISIS Attack Paris? Geopolitics of Terrorism

    Paris France
    Aerial view of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France (Unsplash/Rodrigo Kugnharski)

    It was not, of course, just Paris this weekend: Beirut also felt the murderous strategy of militant Islam. For those who are attuned to ignoring the developing world, the attacks in Paris were shocking, confusing and subject to simplistic explanation: they hate us, they hate freedom, they want Sharia, etc., etc.

    But when it comes to organizations training, supplying and directing acts of terrorism, hate and religion are not the explanations we seek. Organizations, like nation states, are neither suicidal nor nihilistic: they seek to empower themselves and gain security through whatever means are available to them.

    And understanding this need goes a long way towards understanding what happened this weekend. (more…)