Blood year: terror and the Islamic state

191 Pages·2015·0.998 MB·English

by  Kilcullen, David

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Contents
BLOOD YEAR
Terror and the Islamic State
David Kilcullen
CORRESPONDENCE
Inga Clendinnen, Jack Kirszenblat, Peter Martin, Stephen
Duckett, Susan Ryan, Rodney Syme, Paul A. Komesaroff,
Leah Kaminsky, Leanne Rowe, Ian Maddocks, Karen
Hitchcock
Contributors
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BLOOD YEAR Terror and the Islamic State
David Kilcullen
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the
process he does not become a monster. And if you
gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes
into you.
– Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
DEBACLE
United Arab Emirates, November 2014
My driver pulls up to a resort in the Empty Quarter. It’s
after dawn. We’ve been driving for hours across the desert
from Abu Dhabi and are near the Saudi border now; past
this point the sand stretches hundreds of empty miles. The
place is all minarets and battlements – Classical Arabia, as
imagined by a designer with grand tastes and an unlimited
budget. We cross a causeway between dunes and enter a
courtyard past BMWs, a Mercedes and two camouflaged
jeeps.
Over the last mile we’ve been penetrating a series of
tightening security layers. Helicopters hover beyond the
crest, sniffer teams trawl the complex for bombs and bugs,
and dogs bark from the checkpoint, half a mile out, where
police search cars and bags. All but one entrance to the
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resort is sealed; there are no other guests. Inside are more
dogs, a buzz of radios and a counter-assault team: burly
guys with dark glasses and skin-tone earpieces, holsters
visible below grey suits, machine-pistols discreetly within
reach. Sentries step out of doorways to check credentials.
Overhead a silver aerostat, a surveillance blimp positioned
to detect the visual or heat signature of anyone approaching
across the desert, glints in the sun. The sponsor is taking no
chances.
I’m freezing from the air-conditioned car and could do
without all this drama. I stretch, climb out and check my
watch: still on Sydney time. I’ve been travelling twenty-
four hours, fifteen of those on the red-eye from Australia,
and I’m in desperate need of a double espresso, some
sunlight and a piss.
However odd the setting, this is deadly serious: a
conference, long-scheduled, that has turned into a crisis
meeting in this year of massacres and beheadings, fallen
cities and collapsing states – the unravelling, in weeks, of
an entire decade of Western strategy. Former prime
ministers and presidents, current foreign ministers,
generals, ambassadors and intelligence chiefs are here, with
White House staffers, presidential envoys, leaders from the
Middle East and Africa, Americans, Brits and Aussies,
Iranians, Russians, Chinese and Indians. Two well-known
journalists have agreed not to attribute what people say.
Besides the two dozen VIPs, there are a few scruffy field
guys like me, here to present research or brief the plenary
sessions, though of course at gatherings like this the real
business gets done by the grown-ups, at side meetings we
never see. The sessions have names like “Syria and Iraq: In
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Search of a Strategy,” “North Africa in Crisis” and
“Islamist Terrorism and the Region.” Maybe it’s my jetlag,
but people look dazed, as if in the grip of a hangover. If so,
it’s a geopolitical one: the rise of ISIS, the failure of the
Arab Spring, the fracturing of Iraq and the spillover of
violence from Syria have suddenly, dangerously
destabilised the Middle East and North Africa.
In the northern summer of 2014, over roughly one hundred
days, ISIS launched its blitzkrieg in Iraq, Libya’s
government collapsed, civil war engulfed Yemen, Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself Caliph, the latest
Israel–Palestine peace initiative failed in a welter of
violence, and the United States and its allies (including the
United Kingdom and Australia) sent aircraft and troops
back to Iraq. Russia, a key sponsor of Bashar al-Assad in
Damascus, reignited Cold War tensions by annexing
Crimea, sent submarines and aircraft to intimidate its
neighbours in their own sea and airspace, and supported
Ukrainian rebels who shot down an airliner with huge loss
of life. Iran continued its push for nuclear weapons,
supported Assad in Syria and yet became a de facto ally of
the United States in Iraq, as each sought, for different
reasons, to bolster the Baghdad government.
As this disastrous year closed, with the fourth winter of war
settling over Syria, nine million Syrians languished in
miserable, freezing mountain camps, with little prospect of
going home. Half of Syria’s people depended on aid to
survive, and more than 200,000 had died. Across the
increasingly irrelevant border with Iraq, thousands of
people had been displaced, sold into sexual slavery,
decapitated, shot in the street or crucified for minor
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infractions of sharia law – as idiosyncratically interpreted
by whatever local ISIS thug happened to make it his
business. Panic pervaded Baghdad, and Erbil (capital of
Kurdistan) was a frontline city, within the sound of the
guns and occasionally within reach of them.
Foreign fighters – from the Middle East, Europe, Australia,
all over Asia, the Americas and all parts of Africa – poured
into Syria and Iraq at twelve times anything seen at the
height of the American war, swelling ISIS numbers above
30,000 (for comparison, al-Qaeda, at its peak before 9/11,
never had more than 25,000). Hundreds poured across
Syria’s frontier with Turkey, a NATO member that
nonetheless opened its border for fighters travelling to (or,
increasingly, from) the conflict. ISIS provinces appeared in
Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Egypt, and extremists in
Indonesia and Nigeria swore allegiance to Baghdadi’s new
“caliphate.” Attacks by ISIS-inspired terrorists hit Europe,
America, Africa and the Middle East. Thirteen years,
thousands of lives, and billions upon billions of dollars
after 9/11, any gains against terrorism had seemingly been
swept away in a matter of weeks.
On 10 June 2014 ISIS seized Mosul, anchor of northern
Iraq and home to more than two million. Twelve days
before the city fell, President Obama betrayed no inkling of
impending collapse in a speech at the United States
Military Academy at West Point – he failed to mention
ISIS at all, having earlier dismissed them as a “jayvee
[junior varsity] team,” wannabes lacking the capability of
al-Qaeda – and spoke of what was once called the Global
War on Terror as if it was winding down. “You are the first
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class to graduate since 9/11,” the President said, “who may
not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.”
When I first spoke at West Point in 2009, we still had
more than 100,000 troops in Iraq. We were preparing to
surge in Afghanistan. Our counterterrorism efforts were
focused on al Qaeda’s core leadership . . . Four and a
half years later, as you graduate, the landscape has
changed. We have removed our troops from Iraq. We are
winding down our war in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda’s
leadership on the border region between Pakistan and
Afghanistan has been decimated, and Osama bin Laden
is no more . . . today’s principal threat no longer comes
fromacentralizedalQaedaleadership.Instead,itcomes
from decentralized al Qaeda affiliates and extremists,
many with agendas focused in countries where they
operate. And this lessens the possibility of large-scale
9/11-style attacks against the homeland. [emphasis
added]
What happened? How could the President so misjudge
things, just days before the debacle? Can we recover from
this? What does a coherent strategy look like after this
disastrous year?
This essay is my attempt to answer those questions. It
draws on conferences such as this one in November 2014,
on interviews with communities and combatants, work by
my field research teams in Iraq and Syria, and analysis by
other well-informed observers and researchers. The answer,
like most things in war, takes a while to unfold but is
essentially simple: it starts with the recognition that the
West’s strategy after 9/11 – derailed by the invasion of
Iraq, exacerbated by our addiction to killing terrorist
leaders, and hastened by precipitate withdrawals from Iraq
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