If the US wants to defeat ISIL, it needs to start talking to Iran

It is Iran and the vengeful pro-Iranian political parties that the Americans put in power in Baghdad that are to blame for the breakdown of the Iraqi state and the rise of ISIL, writes Alan Philps

Iran says it’s the only country that can defeat ISIL. Alaa Al Marjani / Reuters

It is more than three weeks since the United States and its allies began air strikes against the jihadists of ISIL in Syria. It is estimated that the US has already spent $1 billion in this fight and, if it lasts three years, the total will be at least $30 billion.

Even at this early stage it is worth asking what has been achieved. Not very much to judge by the facts on the ground. ISIL is still fighting on two fronts – gaining ground in Iraq’s Anbar province, where an army base fell on Monday, as well as fighting its way into the Kurdish town of Kobani on the Turkish border.

In the words of General John Allen, the retired US general who is leading the international coalition against ISIL, the jihadists still have “tactical momentum”. While the general says it is too early to declare who is winning, this has not stopped the Iranians abandoning their usual secrecy about their activities in Iraq and Syria to declare that the Americans are doomed to fail.

Ali Larijani, speaker of the Iranian parliament, told CNN that guerrilla fighters would not be destroyed by “dropping bombs on their heads”. While modestly claiming that he did not like to boast, he said it was Iran that had saved Baghdad from the onslaught of ISIL. Only Iran, he said, had the experience to fight terrorism.

Mr Larijani is not alone in Iran’s new PR campaign. The man who pulls Iran’s strings in Iraq, General Qassem Suleimani, has emerged from the shadows to pose in a photo opportunity with Kurdish fighters. He is commander of Iran’s Al Quds force, a special operations unit of the Revolutionary Guards, and was memorably described by General David Petraeus, the former commander of US forces in Iraq, as “a truly evil figure”.

As befits an accomplished spymaster, in the new photographs he comes across as a shy, grandfatherly man, not someone determined to use every means – military and political – to keep Iraq weak and dependent on Tehran.

The Iranian message is clear: Iran is the only country that can defeat ISIL. At the same time the message from ISIL’s propaganda is that only they have the strength and determination to roll back Iranian influence in Iraq and Syria.

The attacks ordered by Barack Obama have so far failed to assure America’s allies that Washington has a strategy to confront the ISIL threat while containing the Syrian civil war. The immediate effect has been to raise the profile of Iran and of ISIL.

It is possible that constant pressure from the air will in time weaken ISIL. But it is hard to find analysts who believe that this is the solution. There are several paradoxes at the heart of the US plan.

So long as the US and its allies are not prepared to send ground troops to Syria – and there are excellent reasons why the Pentagon should not – then the question remains who is going to finish off ISIL. The subtext of Mr Larijani’s statement is that the boots on the ground are those allied to Tehran – the Syrian army and the Hizbollah forces in Syria.

The US response is that the so-called moderate rebels allied to the Syrian National Coalition are being armed and equipped to become a true fighting force to unseat the Assad regime. But this ignores the reality that these rebel groups were formed as local self-defence units and fight best on home turf. Without a national leader or inspiring ideology, they have no reason to take the fight to the enemy, whether it is ISIL or the Syrian regime.

The situation is not static. Rebel groups are being trained in Jordan. Arms supplies to the Islamist and jihadist groups are said to be declining, while the SNC rebels are now better armed. But the net effect of this change is to reduce the firepower of the rebels as a whole, to the advantage of the Syrian army.

More seriously, the message sent by the US air strikes from day one has been confused. By attacking the Nusra Front, originally an Al Qaeda affiliate but seen by many rebel factions as an ally against ISIL, the Americans showed that the reflexes born of the war on terror are still embedded in the Pentagon. From the point of view of the non-ISIL rebel groups, they do not know whether they are being hit by Uncle Sam or Bashar Al Assad.

No one has yet figured out how it is possible for the US to build up the moderate rebels while they are being attacked by the regime’s air force and America does nothing to restrain the regime. While this conundrum remains unsolved, the question being asked is a more urgent one: whether the moderate rebels can maintain their hold of the countryside north of Aleppo?

The man who has followed the tragedy in the heart of the Arab world most closely is the veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, special envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League to Syria until his resignation in May. He is adept at concealing his despair at the failure of his peace mission, but he has some tough advice for the Americans.

The first is that America must talk to Iran. It is “very strange”, he told an audience in London, that the US is trying to destroy ISIL in Iraq without talking to Iran.

It is Iran and the vengeful pro-Iranian political parties that the Americans put in power in Baghdad that are to blame for the breakdown of the Iraqi state and the rise of ISIL.

This should be recognised – not to reward Iran but to make it understand that it bears responsibility for this crisis and cannot continue with the injustice it has imposed on Iraq.

For the moment, Gen Suleimani has a smile on his face for the cameras. How long will it be before he is photographed shaking an American hand? Political reality suggests we are a long way from that.

Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs

On Twitter: @aphilps