Isis the accidental occupiers must now weigh Mosul as boon or burden

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/11/isis-occupiers-mosul-boon-burden

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The leaders of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis) did not expect to seize the northern Iraqi city of Mosul when they attacked on Monday. The preferred tactic of the group in recent years has been to strike swiftly, cause significant casualties and damage, then withdraw.

This time, the government forces were quicker on their feet. Though they outnumbered the militants by around 50 to one they fled, leaving Isis in de facto control.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Isis since 2010, must now confront some of the most acute strategic questions facing Islamic militants over the last decades: whether or not to seize and hold territory, and how to deal with the people living there.

A rapid withdrawal from Mosul would indicate a belief that holding the city is either impossible or undesirable. This is still the most probable outcome. But the fact that, since January, Isis have captured and held three other cities in Iraq – Falluja, Ramadi, and last night Tikrit – as well as Raqqa in neighbouring Syria, indicates that 43-year-old Baghdadi may think twice before taking the vast booty from the Mosul operation and leaving.

His group's name, after all, makes an unequivocal statement of its aims. He leads "the Islamic state" in Iraq and Syria, or rather "al'Sham" or "the Levant". This is very different from the goals suggested by the name al-Qaida, the group founded by Osama bin Laden and now run by his former deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri from Pakistan. The word al-Qaida can mean a physical base – such as the army camps in Mosul looted of their heavy weapons by Isis in recent days – but also a methodology or a maxim.

For a decade or more, Islamist strategists have bitterly debated whether they should seek to establish defensible safe-havens, which can act as launchpads for further expansion, or focus on spectacular terrorist operations, such as 9/11, which aim to radicalise and mobilise entire populations and spark a global "leaderless jihad".

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who set up al-Qaida in Iraq in 2004 and controlled a significant part of the country's western Anbar province before being ousted and killed in 2006, chose the former strategy. Abu Musab al-Suri, a leading Syrian militant, who had seen the crushing of an Islamist uprising in Hama by Hafez al-Assad in 1982, was the main proponent of the latter strategy.

Zarqawi's group so alienated locals with their brutality and intolerance that they rebelled and drove the Islamists out. By the end of the last decade, this experience – and that of other groups elsewhere in the Islamic world – appeared to have overcome the "war of position" strategy in favour of the more global, less territorial "war of manoeuvre". Yet the lure of territory appears eternal.

Egyptian Islamists in the 1990s bemoaned their country's topography as unsuited to the establishment of a secure base from which to operate. In April 2004 a group of senior militants from al-Qaida in Iraq met in Falluja "to review the situation" of their campaign. Abu Anas al-Shami, a Jordanian Palestinian cleric present at the meeting, wrote afterwards: "We realised that after a year of jihad we still had achieve nothing on the ground [and had] failed resoundingly."

Instead of relying on propaganda, he said, they needed a base that would be a springboard for further expansion once the immediate defensive phase of fighting, which they compared to the early trials faced by the prophet Mohammed with his band of followers, was over.

There was a personal motive too: "None of us had even a palm-sized lot of earth on which to reside, no place to find a refuge at home in peace amongst his own," complained Abu Anas, who was killed in November 2004 when US troops retook Fallujah.

When Islamist groups have seized urban areas, and tried to control local populations, the results have, by and large, been a disaster. In Yemen, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsular briefly held the regional capital of Jaar before being forced out by government troops. The Islamic Courts Union briefly took Mogadishu, the Somali capital. Chunks of Libyan and Syrian cities have fallen under Islamist control. The Taliban in Afghanistan had nominal control of five cities and lasted for five years.

But it is clear that most people realise very rapidly that Islamists make very poor municipal administrators – even if Isis have now stopped killing garbage collectors as collaborators. "The people of Mosul have voted with their feet," said analyst and regional expert James Denselow. Almost the entire population of the city appears to have fled.

A survey of the location of extremist-controlled zones across the Islamic world reveals that almost all are remote, often on frontiers beyond the reach of weak central governments, and of limited strategic value, with one glaring exception: the growing, cross-border Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.