Daesh far from over despite fall of Mosul

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi’s recent announcement of Mosul’s liberation from the last remnants of Daesh forces has been perceived by many as the last nail in Daesh’s coffin.

This jubilation, however, remains somewhat incomplete mainly because the senior leadership of Daesh has never been captured, nor has any material proof been brought forth verifying the allegations of its demise. More importantly, the rank and file of this terrorist organization seem to have vanished into thin air, which suggests that the Iraqi government and its allies have conveniently allowed these combatants to slip through the backdoor to avoid a potentially never-ending siege which would further embarrass the Iraqi army and a hodgepodge of Iranian-supported local militias.

Despite the fall of Mosul, Daesh is far from being vanquished as it still commands the Syrian city of Raqqah and has withstood a barrage of campaigns launched by the U.S.-supported Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Mainly composed of Kurdish groups with only a token presence of a few Arab factions, the SDF has repeatedly failed to uproot Daesh from Raqqah and will obviously continue to fail to secure the area given the sequence of events.

The SDF’s disappointing performance, however, cannot be attributed to military factors as the group has been on the receiving end of a huge largesse of funds and military hardware from the U.S. administration, who views these Kurdish forces as moderate allies against Daesh and other extremist factions. The overreliance on these supposedly moderate Kurds is essentially the Achilles heel that Daesh has exploited and will continue to exploit to keep Raqqah in its hands even after its destruction.

Daesh’s occupation of Raqqah has been sustained through brute force and coercion, but also includes an implicit agreement with the native tribes and inhabitants that they will be protected against any external aggression particularly from their Kurdish neighbors to the north. These native obsessions are not unfounded as these Kurdish forces have been accused time and again of ethnically cleansing many of the Arab towns and villages they liberated from Daesh, such as the town of Ras al-Ayn on the Syrian-Turkish border.

According to many people in Raqqah, living under Daesh is far better than losing their lives and their homes to the Kurds. This logic assumes Daesh’s occupation is temporary, and that Daesh will sooner or later be defeated; however, if this victory is to come through the Kurds, this will most probably include their own demise or at best their permanent displacement at the hands of hostile Kurdish militias who do not hide their wish to carve out a state for themselves.

These Arab apprehensions are further cemented by the fact that the four major campaigns launched against Daesh in Raqqah thus far have deliberately sidelined the SDF’s Arab troops. Many of these veteran/secular Arab fighters, remnants of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), have been banned from participating in the assault or have been simply banned from controlling any of the heavy and advanced weaponry made available to their Kurdish comrades in other SDF units.

These Arab regiments have been virtually quarantined in the village of Ain Issa at a distance of 55 km from Raqqah since 2014 and have been ineffectively used by the SDF and their allies as a fig leaf to refute allegations of Kurdish-Arab hostilities.

Regionally, however, the Kurdish element can only make an already volatile situation worse, as the Turkish government has made it clear that they will not allow any further Kurdish expansion near its boarder. Consequently, the Trump administration by allowing the Kurds to monopolize these campaigns is losing Turkey’s full commitment to the war against terrorism, as the former will always be rightfully suspicious of the Kurdish political and military aspirations, thus allowing Daesh more time to maneuver.

The people of Raqqah and Mosul never adopted Daesh’s skewed vision of Islam, nor fought with it, because if they had opted to do so, Daesh would certainly be in a much better position than it is today. However, the likely fall of Raqqah to the SDF might end Daesh’s aspirations for its so-called Islamic State, but it will certainly not make the region a more peaceful place, but rather unleash a new beast with an appetite for ethnic conflict, something which an already war-torn Syria can definitely live without.

Ultimately, the actual question is not whether Daesh will be defeated or not, but rather whether these barbarous groups can remain vanquished. Looking at the fight against Daesh both in Mosul and Raqqah suggests that it will only return but with a new and perhaps more vicious face. Any act of liberation in Iraq or Syria that condones any one sect or an ethnic group persecuting another can only serve to make the resurrection of violent extremists groups even more prompt and all the more precarious.

By Dr. Makram Rabah

-The writer is a lecturer at the American University of Beirut's history department. He is the author of ‘A Campus at War: Student Politics at the American University of Beirut, 1967-1975'.