ISIS Is The Child of Chaos, Not Religion
In the third week of May, ISIS took the city of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria, in two, big, high-profile victories. Though ISIS has constantly been in the news for years now, these two cities seem to return the sense of an unstoppable march of Islamist forces across the Middle East. As the beheadings began almost immediately in Ramadi, ISIS also bombed a mosque in Qatif, a Shia-majority city in Saudi Arabia during Friday prayers. Qatif, incidentally, is a place where Saudi armed forces and police have violated human rights with their usual impunity for years, detaining and even opening fire on protesters from the Shia community. From all of these reports, the sense given to readers is one of unstoppable momentum.
But as Ahmed Ali, in the NYT Opinion section on May 21 clarified, the situation is otherwise: “…the Islamic State is not on an unstoppable march. In Iraq, and to some extent Syria, it remains on the defensive. In April, the Islamic State’s defenses in large swaths of Salahuddin Province and the provincial capital, Tikrit, collapsed.”
So, ISIS has not had unstoppable momentum. After spending many months and many lives trying to take the Kurdish city of Kobani, Syria, they have been repeatedly repulsed since the beginning of 2015. Kurdish forces in Iraq have counterattacked them in Mosul and are keeping them under pressure there. And, although each time there is a battle in an Iraqi city, the Western media discuss the close proximity of that city to Baghdad, that does not mean that Baghdad is likely to fall to ISIS any time soon.
Syria, though, is another story. The stage in both countries is set not for ISIS victory, but for perpetual conflict.
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Jonathan Cook, journalist
One of the best analyses of ISIS and
the circumstances that led to its rise. Justin Podur places ISIS in the
context of a wider global phenomenon of violent irregular armies that
fill the void created by social collapses caused by western
interference.
Referring to ISIS's self-publicised use of
beheadings, Justin Podur raises the following interesting point about
places as diverse as Latin America, Africa and the Middle East:
"Others have theorized along these lines – that irregular armies use
atrocities to achieve the same psychological effect (inducing
hopelessness and terror among those they wish to control) as Western
armies can with their high-tech weaponry. This helps explain the amount
of effort ISIS puts into hype."
And concludes:
"Meanwhile
the West, exporting weapons, running airstrikes, preparing troops for
the next counterinsurgency effort, does not try to resolve conflicts,
just manage them. The US started attacking Iraq in 1990 and is still
doing bombing runs 25 years later. The US sponsored the mujahaddeen in
Afghanistan in the 1970s and is still present 36 years later. Libya’s
dictator was overthrown in 2011 and that country has been in managed
conflict since. The list goes on and on, and will likely soon include
Syria as a Western-managed conflict. Once a country is on the list, it
can take decades to get off it again. In the chaos of these collapsed
states, the next ISIS are being created."
