As American efforts to evacuate troops and citizens from Afghanistan reaches a point of completion, US anti-missile defences are already at work defending attacks. At least five rockets were intercepted stopping them on their tracks, aiming at the Kabul airport.
Currently, America has evacuated about 114,400 people including foreign nationals and Afghans deemed at risk. Meanwhile, British forces have also been evacuated from Afghanistan and efforts are being made to protect the only remaining infrastructure to help people evacuate, if need be.
The onslaught of missiles and suicide bombs have been organized by ISIS who have taken complete responsibility of the attacks. According to Afghan media, the recent missile attacks were initiated from the back of a vehicle. Several other missiles struck various parts of the Afghan capital.
These attacks are going unabated. But later on, a US drone strike was initiated to bring down a suicide car bomber who Pentagon officials said had been preparing to attack the airport on behalf of the ISIS-K, a local affiliate of the Islamic State. It is both enemy of Taliban and the West.
Drone attack led to casualties which has been criticized by Taliban as American unlawful. America will continue to evacuate as many as possible till the deadline of August 31. Canada and Germany have already ended their evacuation efforts each clearing each 4000 plus citizens and Afghanis. However, about 300 German citizens remain in Afghanistan, a spokesman for the foreign office in Berlin shared with the media.
Other countries that have already finished and closed their evacuation efforts include Ireland, Italy, France, Sweden, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Ukraine, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Spain, UAE, Qatar, India, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey. Some definitely remain and might have to wait for longer before any of countries decide to take the bull by its horns, again.
At its peak in 2014, the black flags of the Islamic State flew over 100,000 square kilometers in Iraq and Syria, becoming the principal target for the US’ “War on Terror.” Never before in recent history had an insurgent group taken control of such a large area and subjugated a population of more than eight million people.
With a revenue of hundreds of millions, ISIS was more than capable of outcompeting local governments. More than just occupy, the Islamic State began to govern within its territorial holdings. Clean water and reliable electricity reached cities where it had been previously sparse or nonexistent. Law and order returned to areas ravaged by war in the previous decades.
Yet, this “law and order” ultimately took the form of the Islamic State’s sadistic interpretation of Sharia law. Systematic executions, torture, and brutality became the hallmark of the group in the eyes of the West.
Five years later, the tearing down of the Islamic State’s black banners across Iraq and Syria symbolized progress in the War on Terror. The collapse of the Islamic State’s caliphate, the death of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the loss of tens of thousands of its fighters has given the appearance that the Islamic State was defeated.
As of 2019, ISIS had lost all of its territory and was, on the surface, at its weakest. The US government under President Donald Trump has since touted this as a victory against the Islamic State and global terrorism as a whole.
The US State Department’s annual terror assessment, published on Wednesday, echoed these sentiments. The report reiterated the Trump administration’s claims of victory over the Islamic State, pointing to the death of al-Baghdadi and the group’s loss of territory as examples.
‘Mission not accomplished’
However, the report admitted that none of these achievements were enough to make a meaningful impact in the War on Terror.
As a whole, the government’s rhetoric surrounding the “victory” over ISIS shows a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the Islamic State and Islamist terrorism as a whole.
Believing that the war has already been won, the United States has begun to pull troops from the Middle East en masse. Meanwhile, the Islamic State is starting to lick its wounds and recover, threatening to reverse all of the progress made thus far against it.
A hollow victory
Eager to end Washington’s decades-old commitment in the Middle East, the Trump administration declared victory at the first sign of the Islamic State’s decline. At the same time, those who fought on the front lines against ISIS have warned that the loss of territory is not enough to qualify the claim.
Among those who have warned about the resurgence of the Islamic State following the withdrawal of the United States are Kurdish officials, who have seen the rise and fall of the caliphate first-hand.
“ISIS is still very much intact,” Masrour Barzani, the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, told the Atlantic in an interview earlier this year. “Yes, they have lost much of their leadership. They have lost many of their capable men. But they’ve also managed to gain more experience and to recruit more people around them. So they should not be taken lightly.”
Although the Islamic State has lost its caliphate, tens of thousands of fighters still remain loyal.
Although tens of thousands of the Islamic State’s fighters have been killed or captured since 2014, the group has retained a fighting force of between 10,000 to 20,000 troops. Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, ISIS was still able to carry out upwards of 60 attacks per month in Iraq. With the United States out of the picture, this should only increase as the Islamic State finds itself with less opposition.
Aside from directly attacking the foot soldiers and leadership of the Islamic State, the War on Terror has involved targeting the finances of violent extremist groups. The Islamic State’s finances came primarily from internal sources, such as oil revenue and taxation, much of which disappeared as the group lost its territorial holdings.
However, although the Islamic State lost much of its income alongside its territory, the group still has access to at least $100 million, according to the most recent UN estimate. With an average terrorist attack costing a fraction of this, ISIS has no need for concern over its finances at the moment.
The Guerilla Caliphate
In the past, self-proclaimed members of the Islamic State have not relied on the caliphate to launch devastating attacks. In the West and elsewhere, terrorists with little or no affiliation to the Islamic State chain of command carried out many of the Islamic State’s most infamous attacks.
Most recently, Islamist terrorists with loose links to the ISIS carried out the 2019 Sri Lanka bombings, which killed more than 300 people. While the Islamic State inspired the attack, those involved coordinated and planned the operation without any influence from ISIS itself.
The devastating 2019 Easter bombing in Sri Lanka was orchestrated by local militants inspired by the Islamic State.
Far from an anomaly, this has become the new norm in the Islamic State’s strategy. Instead of training and deploying fighters from Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State has preferred to share information over the Internet on how to carry out individual attacks.This strategy of “leaderless resistance” has ensured that traditionally military strategies will not work against the Islamic State. Bombing campaigns and ground invasions by the West only serve as fuel to justify attacks by sympathizers on foreign soil.
Furthermore, the Islamic State’s decentralized structure lends credence to critics who argue that targeting the group’s leadership is ineffective. Experts in particular have argued that so-called “decapitation” tactics do not work.
“I don’t think taking him [al-Baghdadi] off the battlefield ends the Islamic State threat at all, especially when a lot of that threat now is based outside of Iraq and Syria,” American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow Katherine Zimmerman said.
“If Baghdadi were still alive today, would the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, would the Islamic State branches globally look significantly different? I don’t think so,” she added.
A Band-aid for terror
Instead of following a militaristic approach to the War on Terror, experts argue that targeting the root causes of terrorism is the only way to put an end to the Islamic State.
“We need to think about how do we play a role in getting at the disease rather than just dealing with the symptoms,” former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell told lawmakers on Wednesday.
The State Department report addressed this as well, supporting the argument that military intervention alone cannot defeat global terrorism. In particular, the report emphasized that addressing the roots of terrorism is essential to winning the War on Terror, a sentiment supported by local officials.
“If people are jobless, if people are hopeless, if people have no security, if people have no opportunity, if there is no political stability, it’s always easy for terrorist organizations to manipulate local populations,” Barzani said. “ISIS is a by-product. So as long as these factors are still valid, there will always be either ISIS or something similar to ISIS.”
Despite the fact that the State Department acknowledges this, there has been little progress towards addressing the root causes of the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Iraq is still scarred by widespread sectarianism, corruption, and poor governance. Meanwhile, the war in Syria has deprived its population of the most basic human rights.
The isolationist shift in American foreign policy since the ascension of Trump to the presidency has left Iraq and Syria vulnerable to the Islamic State’s recovery, and threatens to plunge the two countries into renewed crisis.
On Monday, the French Foreign Ministry announced it has brought another ten children of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters back to France, adding to the 18 repatriated since March 2019.
In the June 22 communique, France thanked local authorities for their cooperation and said the children are now in the hands of French medical and security services.
“France has carried out the return of ten French minors, orphans or humanitarian cases, who were in camps in northeast Syria,” said the press release from the foreign ministry.
“These children have been turned over to French judicial authorities, are receiving medical treatment and have been taken in by social services,” the ministry added.
The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria foreign relations commission co-chair Abdulkarim Omar confirmed via Twitter that a French delegation took charge of the “orphaned and humanitarian cases” in the city of Qamishli.
The International Crisis Group says 13,500 foreign women and their children are living across three camps in northeast Syria, and 300 of them are believed to be French.
The issue of repatriating children taken to or born into the Islamic State’s so-called “caliphate” in Syria is fraught with logistical and policy challenges.
Human rights campaigners argue the French and other foreign governments have a duty of care to the children of foreign fighters. According to activists and members of their extended families, France should repatriate minors immediately, removing them from the physical and psychological dangers they face in the camps.
“It is eminently possible to repatriate these families, there is no practical barrier to it, all that is needed at the moment is the political will to do so,” Mat Tinkler, the director of international programs and policy at Save the Children, told The Guardian in February.
Disease and malnutrition are rife in the makeshift refugee-cum-prison camps like the notorious Al Hul, aid agencies report. Three children drowned after a rare summer downpour hit a camp in Idlib on the weekend, destroying tents and possessions and highlighting the tenuous and dangerous position of children living in Syrian camps.
The French government maintains that the children’s parents should be forced to face justice in Syria, and said children will continue to be repatriated on a case-by-case basis.
Foreign governments have cited the logistical and security challenges of accessing the camps as reasons for not providing assistance to the children. The Australian government, for one, said it is not willing to risk the lives of soldiers or Department of Foreign Affairs staff to rescue “hardcore” terrorists who “have the potential and capacity to come back here and cause a mass casualty event.”
The pro-Kurdish authorities who run the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria where the camps are located have urged foreign countries to repatriate detainees as they do not have the resources to hold them indefinitely.
They have also escorted a number of foreign citizens, mainly women in children, to neighboring Iraq to facilitate the repatriation process and reduce the risk of repatriation for foreign governments.
Former intelligence chief Mustafa Kadhemi’s elevation to the role of prime minister seems to have helped restore US confidence in Iraq and laid the ground for the two to re-engage in strategic dialogue starting on Thursday. The talks were originally planned as a high-level meeting for April, but the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed them online.
“With new threats on the horizon, including the global coronavirus pandemic, collapsed oil prices, and a large budget deficit, it’s imperative that the United States and Iraq meet as strategic partners to plan a way forward for the mutual benefit of each of our two nations,” Pompeo said in a June 10 media briefing.
Pompeo warmly welcomed Kadhemi’s April ascension to the premiership, and Iraqi sources say the White House has invited the new leader to visit this year.
“There was a lack of confidence in the relationship with the previous government, and we’re not there anymore,” an anonymous official told the French Press Agency (AFP).
Relations between Baghdad and Washington cooled after a US rocket strike on a convoy leaving Baghdad Airport killed Iranian Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani and a number of Iraqi militia leaders in January. There have also been a number of rocket attacks against US targets in Iraq this year, carried out mainly by Iran-backed Iraqi militia groups, placing further stress on the bilateral relationship.
Dialogue despite tensions
Months of political uncertainty also dogged ties, but former Iraqi Foreign Minister Ali Alhakim said that in spite of those tensions, “the dialogue between us and the United States has never stopped.”
“This dialogue is appropriate, and it’s timely as well. Our relationship went into sort of a quiet mood and we want to reinvigorate it,” said Alhakim, who served as foreign minister from 2018 until Khadhemi replaced him with Fuad Hussein in April.
On June 9, the ex-foreign minister and career diplomat told the Atlantic Council talks will likely center on how to move forward with the 2008 Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) that underpins the two countries’ bilateral relationship.
“Where do we go from here? Do we continue on the same path? This will be answered in the first ten or fifteen minutes, just to figure out where the two sides are,” Alhakim predicted.
An unnamed US official who spoke to AFP echoed Alhakim’s thoughts, telling them, “whatever comes out of the dialogue is going to set the future of our strategic relationship.”
“Am I still going to fly surveillance drones or not? Do you still want our intelligence?” are the sort of questions the US source believes will be on the table.
Relationship deeper than security cooperation
US Ambassador to Iraq Matthew Tueller stressed in a recent video that the US-Iraq relationship goes much deeper than security assistance. He said the talks will also center on politics, economics, culture, and energy — as well as US support for Iraqi troops fighting ISIS.
According to the US Embassy in Iraq, the US has been an active supporter of Iraq’s fight against COVID-19. The US has donated $44 million worth of COVID-19 aid through USAID, and is also funding UN Migration’s (IOM) virus surveillance program and outreach work with vulnerable communities across Iraq.
“Security is important, but so is finance and health. These are part of the SFA, and this is where the US and other countries are actually helping us, along with the International Monetary Fund,” Alhakim said. “We need help with humanitarian issues. These are not really under the radar; they are visible, and this money is assisting Iraqis.”
Domestically, the challenges facing Iraq have escalated dramatically in 2020, driven by COVID-19, a drop in global oil prices, and the political deadlock that Wednesday’s vote ended. Record-low oil revenues have hit the economy hard, while the country’s ill-equipped health system is struggling to deal with a COVID-19 outbreak and the remnants of ISIS remain a top security threat.
The US, backed by its coalition partners, will be gunning for US troops to remain, a proposal the Iraqis are likely to accept in a bid to sure-up state security for Kadhemi’s fledgling government.
Another hot topic will be Iraq’s besieged economy. The country’s out-dated energy grid, for one, could do with US infrastructure funding, but given the long-term nature of weaning Iraq off its Iranian-energy dependency, securing a longer waiver protecting Iraq from US sanctions will likely be a priority for Iraqi negotiators.
