The terrorist organization known as Daesh in the Middle East and Europe but as ISIS or ISIL in the US is in a death spiral.
Daesh hit its peak of territory in 2015 on taking Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s al-Anbar province.
Since then, it has virtually been rolled up in Iraq, having lost all of al-Anbar except a small town on the Syrian border, having lost all of Diayala and Salahuddin provinces, and having lost most of Ninewah, including 75% of Mosul, its last remaining metropolis.
(Its capital, of Raqqa in Syria, is a town of about 100,000, the capital of Raqqa Province, which had 900,000 people before the Syrian civil war broke out but about half of those fled to Turkey, especially the Kurds in the north).
Daesh still holds Hawija, a town of 100,000 before its occupation that is likely half that now; and Tel Afar, a largely Turkmen town that was likewise smallish before the Daesh onslaught. It is likely even smaller now, since all the Shiite Turkmen will have fled. I wonder if Daesh has as many as a million people living under its rule in Iraq any more. Some 400,000 of those are in West Mosul, which will likely fall to the Iraqi central government within a few months. At that point Daesh and its phony caliphate will fairly quickly be completely rolled up as a governmental entity. They will continue to be strong in some villages and city neighborhoods and will continue to carry out terrorist bombings in Baghdad and elsewhere, but they won’t be a government.
Once it has lost the small amount of territory it now has in northern Iraq and a slightly larger swathe of eastern Syria that is still under its authority, what will Daesh do?
Many adherents will defect and just go home in disappointment. Many have already been disappointed by the brutality and inhumanity of Daesh rule, and have fled. Daesh tries to stop such defections at present, but its ability to do so is rapidly declining. You often meet with a meme that once a young man has served in a radical organization he is thereafter always dangerous. In fact, many former radicals have abandoned their radicalism for a perfectly normal life back home.
Some former members of the caliphal mafia state will go underground, forming cells, and attempting to continue to run extortion rackets and carry out terrorist bombings in Baghdad and Damascus.
Yet others will try to haunt the West, which they will blame for their defeat. Daesh propaganda on the internet has already worked its way into the dreams and nightmares of a handful of petty criminals and ne’er-do-wells who have pulled off terrorist attacks in Europe.
It was such a loner and minor criminal, Khalid Masood, who drove his vehicle into people on Westminster Bridge and then stabbed a policeman guarding parliament. He wounded some 40 people, some of them catastrophically, and killed 3, in addition to committing suicide by cop.
Although Daesh claimed to have been behind the plot, the diction of their message makes experts suspicious that Masood had little or nothing to do with the organization. He had been a misfit and deviant for some time.
Daesh, as it sinks into obscurity and loses the shooting war, will likely turn to terrorism and attempts to win the civilizational war (not between Christianity and Islam but between humaneness and ruthlessness). In some instances, it will plot out attacks, using its own command and control. In others, it will just try to get into the heads of rebellious adolescents or far right wing religious nuts and convince them to carry out attacks.
But the big play for Daesh is a long game in which the organization manages to herd Europe’s tens of millions of Muslims into radicalism, using the European far right such as Marine LePen. It will attack Christian Europeans and secular ones in an attempt to get them to mistreat European Muslims. Then it will offer itself to the latter as their protection, as their muscle in the face of white hostility. This strategy was the one Daesh pursued in Iraq, with a great deal of success over a decade, allowing it to grab 40% of Iraqi territory.
A lot of politicians will fall for this ploy, and give Daesh what it wants by enacting unfair and discriminatory policies toward Western Muslims. Our own Donald J. Trump is a dupe collaborating with this Daesh plot as we speak.
A lot of media fall for Daesh tricks, too. Giving them 24/7 coverage for a stupid technique like running down helpless pedestrians with a vehicle is unwise. The Masood attack in London had no military implications at all and never actually threatened British national security. Some 1700 pedestrians are run over and killed every year in the UK. The attack by a white nationalist youth on Quebec Muslims in a mosque, which killed more people though it wounded fewer, did not attract wall to wall coverage.
Daesh wants you to be afraid. Refuse fear. Daesh wants you to hate Muslims. Find a Muslim and show them some love. Keep doing this and after a while there won’t be any Daesh. Nonviolence, peace and love are the only way to defeat stochastic or random radicalism and terror, whether those diseases have taken hold in white supremacists or in stray Muslims.
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3 Comments
Cole: “Daesh, as it sinks into obscurity and loses the shooting war, will likely turn to terrorism and attempts to win the civilizational war (not between Christianity and Islam but between humaneness and ruthlessness).”
And,
“A lot of media fall for Daesh tricks, too. Giving them 24/7 coverage for a stupid technique like running down helpless pedestrians with a vehicle is unwise.”
Well, well well, such cheap tricks as death by car. Perhaps they’ll learn the preferred technique of aerial bombing, recently demonstrated by the master of terrorism when it killed 33 civilians taking shelter in a school in Syria (a much more humane method than the ruthlessness of a drive by). Death by aerial bombing, how mundane, at least the media knows well enough not to waste its time on such things when it can focus on the cheapness and brutality of running people down with a car.
Oh, by the way, “Daesh wants you to be afraid.” At least they’ve learned something from the master.
Thanks for the insights Juan.
Not all is known, but it is increasingly looking like the recent London “attack” was the act of a mentally disturbed loner which has simply been appropriated by Daesh in retrospect.
No one in public office would admit it in the UK, not even Jeremy Corbyn, that that this action can barely be called a terrorist attack. It is much more like a random atrocity committed by someone with severe mental health issues, rather in the vein of a father and husband who snaps and murders his family before killing himself.
It suits the UK surveillance state and its servants to call this an Islamist, or imply, that this was an Islamist attack, and that the perpetrator killed a Westminster policeman in a thankfully erratic attack on the Houses of Parliament was a gift to the cretins in the UK government cabinet.
The Conservative Party cabinet of millionaires could spout how we are all in this together, even though no politician was ever in any real danger. I dare say some of the toads shit their pants at the time. We had the security minister spouting how “they don’t like our freedoms, and our way of life” and such putrid guff, and we had established commentators telling us how this person was far from a “lone wolf”, without any evidence.
The actions, the sequence of events screamed out that this was a disorganised, random atrocity, probably by an individual with extreme mental health issues.
My answer to Juan Cole would be that the media gives this kind of thing 24/7 hyper-cover, with little fact and a lot of speculation because it fills papers and television time cheaply, it runs along the grain of US imperial interest and actions in the Middle East and the concommitant Islamophobia ideology (and the erasure of mass Arab/Muslim interests) designed to make the oil rich states ripe for the plucking if they don’t fall in line; and it keeps a certain section of the UK population angry, afraid and obedient to the most abusive power and unjustified authorities.
And, of course, US and UK bombing is well intentioned, however many civilians are killed over however many months or years.
Vijay Prashad’s article “Violence: Theirs and Ours”, expresses more precisely what my sarcasm attempted and begs the question: Why does Cole write articles like the one above? As you and Prashad point out, the London attacker was more criminal than terrorist, and the probability he was recruited by ISIS is extremely low if not negligible. So why use him he to highlight our “humaneness” and their “ruthlessness”? Perhaps as Prashad suggests it is attribution bias, “a familiar theme in the literature of modern psychology…refer[ring] to the problem that occurs when people evaluate the actions of themselves or others based not on the facts but on attributions transferred from inherent biases. This seems likely to me.