LONDON // The defeat of ISIL may depend less on military action than on a popular revolt in captured territories against its “totalitarian” reign of terror, according to a report from an international authority on extremism.
Richard Barrett, a former British intelligence chief who led a United Nations team monitoring Al Qaeda and the Taliban, says the group could become a victim of the same “thirst for change” it exploited when seizing swathes of Iraq and Syria.
In his report, Mr Barrett, now a senior vice president of the US-based Soufan group, a security and intelligence service, studies the origins, structure, funding, operations and media strategy of ISIL in rare depth.
He describes as unprecedented the “remarkable ability of a relatively weak and largely marginalised group of violent individuals, numbering in the hundreds, to establish themselves as a threat to international peace and security in command of an army of more than 30,000 fighters and controlling territory”.
“The Islamic State is an alarming phenomenon,” he said. “It may wither and die as quickly as it has emerged, or it may prove to be the catalyst for major change within the region and beyond.”
Mr Barrett said he believes the rise of ISIL has not occurred because it is strong but because the governments of Iraq and Syria are weak, not necessarily in terms of financial and military resources but in their ability to govern.
“The Arab Spring, which had already led to the downfall of the governments of four countries before allowing the Islamic State to take root in Syria, is only part of the context for this accident of history,” he said. “Beyond that is the exponential spread of social media and the empowerment and connectivity that it has provided to people whose lives might otherwise have remained circumscribed by the traditions of their families and the practices of their communities.”
The same trend, with social media acting as a powerful tool to shape world events, presents ISIL with what Mr Barrett called its biggest challenge.
“It will be no more able to harness the social, economic and political forces around it than were the states that, through their failure, allowed the space for the Islamic State to grow,” he said. “The thirst for change that the Islamic State has managed to exploit will not be slaked by its totalitarian approach towards its subjects.
“In today’s world, no state, however remote, can hope to control its population by limiting its access to information or suppressing its ability to think.”
Mr Barrett envisaged ISIL’s use of violence to enforce its rule as another possible cause of its ultimate decline. This ruthlessness, he claimed, is likely to “prevent the group from ruling effectively and building broader support beyond the front line fighters who protect its security and the authoritarian killers who patrol its streets”.
Where ISIL has succeeded, he said, is in offering a “stronger, cleared and more consistent message than opponents”.
“For all its violence, the Islamic State promises its recruits adventure and intense engagement with an exciting new venture. There are no competing voices offering anything comparable.”
On ISIL funding, he cites revenue from black market oil sales, taxes on businesses and individuals, road tolls, the sale of captured equipment, the output of seized factories and “traditional criminal activity such as kidnap for ransom, looting, extortion and protection money”.
Individual donations, once an important revenue stream, are now seen as less significant.
Mr Barrett said the control of territory, home to about six million people on either side of the Iraqi-Syrian border, depends on alliances with Sunni tribal groups, former members of Saddam Hussein’s army and intelligence services and assorted opponents of the Damascus and Bagdad governments.
ISIL has also grabbed land held by weaker adversaries, regardless of their political stance or sectarian belief, and areas with oil, water and wheat resources.
The most active supporters generally know too little about Islam to be able to challenge ISIL distortions of the faith, Mr Barrett said.
“They accept at face value the justifications provided for the widespread murder and absolutist style of government that are its hallmarks.”
Despite his belief that it would take an uprising to defeat the group, Mr Barrett said that ISIL is concerned that the US-led coalition’s airstrikes could “tip the balance against it”.
With the movement of fighters and equipment riskier, and the safe storage of arms harder, he sees ISIL having to find ways to hide deeper within the civilian population in the hope the coalition runs out of obvious targets and starts to cause civilian casualties.
But his conclusion stated that military action will only limit ISIL’s physical reach and cannot destroy its appeal unless an alternative is available.
“There is no going back to how things were,” he said. “The dynamics of the Middle East, and its social and political development, will all look quite different by the time the Islamic State disappears, and it is up to the regional powers, helped by the international community, to ensure that what comes afterwards harnesses the energy of dissent in a more positive direction.”
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
To view the report click here.
