NEW YORK // US officials have admitted the Islamic State can be defeated only by expanding the fight against them from Iraq to Syria, but say this would require a regional coalition working with Washington to succeed.
Forming such a coalition, including regional allies and long-time rivals, hinges on crucial changes in Baghdad that have yet to be carried out.
Sunni-led countries say the Iraqi government would have to govern inclusively and reform the country’s security forces before they can fully commit their financial and military resources to fighting Islamic State.
For the time being, the US administration has indicated that the extremists can be “contained” by continuing airstrikes against them in Iraq, though comments by the US president and top defence officials following the beheading of an American journalist indicate that the US may be prepared to broaden its involvement.
“They can be contained, but not in perpetuity,” the US defence secretary Chuck Hagel said on Thursday. “This is an organisation that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision which will eventually have to be defeated.”
Asked whether US airstrikes in Syria were being considered, Mr Hagel said all options were on the table.
“To your question: can they be defeated without addressing that part of their organisation which resides in Syria? The answer is no,” said the top US military official, Gen Martin Dempsey, speaking beside Mr Hagel.
Gen Dempsey said airstrikes are “only one small part” of what is needed.
“And that will come when we have a coalition in the region that takes on the task of defeating [Islamic State] over time.”
He said strikes in Syria may be carried out by a regional ally and not the US.
That level of involvement, he said, “requires the application of all the tools of [US] national power – diplomatic, economic, information, military”.
Gen Dempsey said the Islamic State’s defeat would only come “when it is rejected by the over 20 million disenfranchised Sunnis that happen to reside between Damascus and Baghdad”.
The US has said Gulf Arab countries and Jordan will be important players by using their leverage with Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq. The tribes are needed to help fight the Islamic State and ally with the new government being formed by Haider Al Abadi.
Iraqi relations with the UAE and Saudi Arabia were nearly nonexistent during the rule of the former premier Nouri Al Maliki, who was seen as too close to Iran. But in a promising development, Saudi Arabia’s ruler, King Abdullah, supported Mr Al Abadi’s selection, as did Iran.
Getting Riyadh and Tehran on the same page, at least in the short term, to support Baghdad is crucial.
Analysts caution that Mr Al Abadi has yet to show that he will reverse the sectarian policies that helped fuel the country’s current crisis.
“Abadi and Maliki share a similar political base, and it remains to be seen whether Abadi will be able to adopt a more inclusive approach,” said Brian Katulis, a foreign policy expert at the Center for American Progress think tank in Washington.
“Just as important are reforms and changes in the Iraqi security forces. It remains to be seen whether the sectarianism … will be sufficiently addressed, even if a new coalition is built.”
The US is conditioning increased military help to Iraq on security-sector reform, especially a scaled-back relationship with Iranian-backed Shia militias.“That’s a big problem,” Mr Katulis said.
The challenge was underscored on Friday when gunmen stormed a mosque and killed more than 60 Sunni worshippers in Diyala province, though it was not established even a day later whether the attackers were a Shiite militia or from the Islamic State.
Mr Katulis said the US could expand its air support beyond northern areas near Kurdistan and the Mosul Dam to other cities where Iraqi forces are battling the Islamic State, such as Fallujah and Tikrit, but this was unlikely “given the high hurdles” to first achieving the reforms demanded by Washington.
But time is not on the side of those fighting the Islamic State. The group’s lightning advances in Iraq and Syria may force countries in the region to put aside rivalries.
If the Islamic State “threat metastasises over the next several months at the same alarming rate as during the past several months, we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility of Saudi Arabia being willing to participate in an international alliance against it even if Iran is part of that same alliance,” said Lori Plotkin Boghardt, a Gulf politics expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Even more likely in the short term is coordination against the Islamic State between Gulf countries and Iraq, but Ms Boghardt and other observers doubted whether GCC relations with Iraq and Iran would remain good for long.
“Old habits die hard and exist for a reason,” she said.
Within the US administration, there have been reports that the beheading of the American journalist James Foley has led to a debate about whether to take more direct action inside Syria, but officials and analysts doubt whether there will be any sudden change in Mr Obama’s Syria policy.
There is not “much of a debate when the target sets aren’t good and there’s a lack of reliable partners to serve as ground troops in the way the peshmerga … have,” said Mr Katulis, whose think tank is close to the White House. The “US will continue to strike [in Iraq], and it may go on for a while, but there’s no capacity or appetite to do all in.”
Even if regional countries joined the fight against Islamic State, it would still not be enough to defeat the group as they simply do not have the capabilities required, said Faysal Itani, a resident fellow at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, in Washington.
“Iran is already struggling to shore up its clients,” Mr Itani said, referring to Baghdad and Damascus, “and everything the GCC countries have tried to do in this conflict has turned into a mess.”
US airstrikes backing peshmerga and Iraqi forces also “will not do it”, he said.
“This requires a Sunni-led military and political effort against [Islamic State] in the areas that it controls – depriving it of the bases of its claim to statehood: population, territory, and resources.”
Enlisting Sunnis helped defeat an earlier version of Islamic State – Al Qaeda in Iraq – by 2008, but at that time there were more than 100,000 US troops in the country who could protect and pay the tribal forces. Since then, the Islamic State has killed many of leaders of the Sunni groups that allied with the US and is in a much stronger position.
Significant outside help would be required to convince Sunnis to take on the Islamic State, and Gulf countries could play a central role with their financial resources to convince them of a long-term commitment, Ms Boghardt said.
“This may be one of the few options left at the local level.”
tkhan@thenational.ae
