It certainly looks as if ISIS is in retreat. Over the past couple of months, it has lost territory in both Iraq and Syria. Its two signal captures in Iraq a couple of years ago, Fallujah and Mosul, have either been lost or are about to be, with Fallujah retaken in June, and Mosul now the focus of an imminent ground offensive. And in Syria, many, civilian and ISIS alike, are fleeing the de facto capital of the Islamic State, Raqqa, before the approaching anti-ISIS coalition of mainly Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian, Armenian, Turkmen and Circassian militias, aided and abetted by US airpower, launches the inevitable, final assault.
With the loss of territory, especially in oil-rich Iraq, ISIS’s revenues are drying up, too. Reports suggest that it is having to cut fighters’ pay, levy new taxes, and, in a fiat born of desperation rather than devotion, increase fines for breaking its religous code. ISIS, which won adherents so quickly by dint of its sheer success, its fearful potency, is now losing them just as quickly, as its failures mount and its impotence emerges. Kurdish forces claim that ISIS fighters are now shaving off their beards, and even disguising themselves as women, in an attempt to flee Syria with the refugees.
But there can be no celebration among Western leaders, who, at various points, have dubbed ISIS ‘the most serious threat’ to our way of life, and the fight against it the ‘greatest struggle of our generation’. Not because ISIS is not as barbaric as it’s been cracked up to be. It is and more. No, there can be no celebration because ISIS’s slow-motion collapse is no victory. Rather, it’s another phase in the unravelling of a region, another stage in the unfolding chaos, a climatic alteration in the ongoing storm that has engulfed what’s left of Iraq and Syria, and redrawn territorial boundaries as quickly as the institutions of civil society have been cast asunder.
And caught in the eye of the storm it helped to stir is the coalition of the clueless, those Western powers, with the US to the reluctant fore, who five years ago set themselves up against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, anointed his successors in the now long-forgotten Syrian National Council, and emboldened and funded the armed opposition, a rag-tag selection of ex-Syrian army, mercenary fighters and, of course, a whole host of Islamist militias. It was a fatal move. The West’s intervention transformed a conflict between Assad’s government and a disenfranchised largely Sunni majority into something else: a civil war, at once more intractable, more inflamed, more entrenched, than anything that had preceded it.
At the time it seemed like the easy righteous pose for Western leaders to strike. Assad, who in 2009 was dubbed the ‘great reformer’ by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, was the bad guy du jour, a chinless wonder of a dictator oppressing his own people, a figure about whom, as Clinton later put it, ‘America has absolutely nothing invested in him remaining in power’. But none of this was grounds for actual intervention. There was nothing strategic about it. Nothing grounded in material reality or diplomatic imperatives. It was an ethical pose; a piece of PR dressed up as foreign policy; a chance for the likes of Clinton, Cameron, Hollande et al to play at being statesmen, and conjure up the moral authority on the international stage that they were unable to on the domestic stage.