Suffocating the Islamic State’s core territory is the administration’s aim
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Version 0 of 1. Former defense secretary Robert M. Gates provided a reality check last week to much of the overblown political rhetoric being voiced about how to deal with the Islamic State in the wake of the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris. “What’s the mission?” Gates asked rhetorically Tuesday when questioned by Charlie Rose on the current talk of an allied effort to take back what’s become the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Raqqa, Syria. “How are they going to figure out who’s ISIS and who’re the citizens of Raqqa,” a city of 200,000 or more, Gates said. “Do they think the ISIS army is going to come out in uniform marching in formations to challenge us, as opposed to melting into the population?” The Islamic State is also known as ISIS and ISIL. He continued, “From a straightforward military standpoint, you haven’t killed their army, you’ve seized their headquarters, but their army has dissipated into the countryside and presumably will hold Mosul [a city of more than 1 million] and other places.” Gates then asked, “What’s the political side of this equation? Who is going to come in and provide governance . . . the follow-up once we have carried out this military mission?” In Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates pointed out, “the civilian side of our efforts was too weak and [still] has not got the kind of robustness that would be necessary.” To some degree, Brett McGurk, President Obama’s special envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, dealt with some of Gates’s questions at a briefing for reporters on Friday. Describing Raqqa as where Islamic State leaders are located along with their planning cells, McGurk said the allies’ plan is to work “with all the forces available . . . to isolate and entrap ISIL in Raqqa.” He cited as an example of a success the Nov. 13 U.S. drone strike in Raqqa that appeared to kill Jihadi John, the British citizen whose real name was Mohammed Emwazi and who served as a video spokesman for the publicized Islamic State beheadings of captured U.S., British and Japanese citizens. “We’ve seen,” McGurk added, “that as we continue to put pressure on ISIL, they make mistakes, they do stupid things, and we are going to really do all we can to intensify the pressure over these coming weeks.” McGurk said that some 30,000 foreign fighters had been flowing into Syria and Iraq from 100 countries, lured by “this phony notion of the caliphate that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi [the Islamic State’s leader] announced in the summer of 2014, and . . . this expanding state that they claim to be trying to create.” He said “suffocating the core” territory that the Islamic State had seized over the past two years and “shrinking that area” were the focus of U.S. and its allies’ military and diplomatic activities. McGurk described the Kurdish fighters — known as peshmerga — retaking Sinjar on Nov. 12 and cutting the main highway between Raqqa and Mosul as “part of the suffocation. . . . We want to isolate them in Raqqa; we want to isolate them in Mosul; and then continue to strangle and increase the pressure, and that’s going to continue.” The allies are also moving to close points where foreign fighters enter Syria from Turkey, but McGurk admitted there remains a 98-kilometer area along the Syria-Turkey border “that ISIL still controls.” He described it as “a heartland for them, and they are fortified there,” not only because they believe Armageddon is going to begin there but also because it is “an area in which they collect foreign fighters and direct them across the battlefield.” McGurk added, “To find the forces on the ground to do the fighting and to do it in a way in which we know they’re going to win is something that we are in military-to-military conversations with the Turks on.” Gates said basically the Obama strategy was correct, but working too slowly. He called for “intensification of things we’re already doing . . . identifying tribes and others like Kurds who are willing to defend their own territory, their own villages, their own tribal lands” and help them directly with military equipment and support. Gates said the introduction of large numbers of U.S. troops “would aggravate the problem,” but he does believe there should be a “loosening of the rules of engagement” and some modest increase in numbers. He wants to see U.S. special operations forces “become more active” and advisers and trainers embedded down to the battalion level rather than at higher headquarters. Like others he would like to see U.S. military personnel act as forward air controllers and spotters and CIA and military intelligence units undertake more covert operations in the way of infiltration of Islamic State leadership and even sabotage activities. He also thinks there is a need to establish safe havens on the eastern Syrian border so the Russians can be assured they are not a threat to their ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, but solely a humanitarian effort to ease the refugee problem now facing Europe. Gates pointed out the difficulties facing the administration in putting together a coalition on the ground to confront the Islamic State. “Almost everybody in the region has their own agenda, and fighting ISIS is not the top item,” he said. He compared what the White House was trying to do in the Middle East to three-dimensional chess “with no one on the same page.” |