The Institute for the Study of War will release a major report on Monday, May 18, on the ground war against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).
The author, ISW’s Research Director, Jessica Lewis McFate, is a former US Army intelligence officer who spent time on the ground in Iraq tracking ISIS’ predecessor, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, along with other groups. She is the lead ISIS analyst at ISW and is one of the global specialists on the organization.
This report details the strengths and limitations of ISIS, as well as the steps needed to counter this group in 2015.
As McFate points out “The US-led campaign to degrade ISIS in Iraq is experiencing early success. However, ISIS is the kind of adaptive and resilient enemy that is difficult to defeat outright. The US-led coalition will incur risk if it mistakes ISIS’s low-profile tactics as actual losses to its overall military capability.”
Read the first part of the preview, on ISIS's "remain and expand" strategy, here.
Countering ISIS’s strategy “to remain and expand” in 2015 requires out-performing its ground forces inside Iraq and Syria and re-establishing permanent security there.
Degrading ISIS in support of this goal does not mean killing a certain number of fighters. It means limiting ISIS’s ability to flex and bounce back to resume offensive operations.
Several operational conclusions from this report suggest ways to out-maneuver, out-pace, and out-flex ISIS. The recommendations below provide ways to maximize tactical opportunities to degrade ISIS in ways that constrain its options and provide important opportunities to build momentum for anti-ISIS forces through successive and cumulative tactical victories. They are insufficient to defeat ISIS overall, but they are ways to maximize the ground war that is already underway to achieve strategic effects.
ISIS’s pinch maneuver may also work in reverse. The Iraqi Security Forces are in a better position in Anbar in 2015 than they are in northern Iraq because the ISF possesses a forward military position at al-Asad airbase. Forward military positions perforate ISIS’s contiguous control and allow the ISF to envelop and isolate intermediate ISIS positions such as Hit.
Re-establishing control of the airbases at Tel Afar and Qayyara in northern Iraq could similarly compromise ISIS’s area defenses and force ISIS to decide between offensive actions to re-consolidate contiguous control around Mosul and other defensive objectives. ISIS will attack ISF forward positions heavily; and therefore their logistics and defenses must hold.
Establishing forward positions for the ISF possibly require ISIS to designate northern Iraq as its main effort. Forward positions may also isolate and de-couple ISIS’s operations other fronts, which the ISF must nonetheless cover simultaneously with the assumption that ISIS will respond by attacking elsewhere. ISIS pursues northern Iraq, Anbar, and northern Syria simultaneously, and anti-ISIS forces must do so also.
Iraq also needs a better way to patrol deserts.
The Iraqi Security Forces attempted to launch anti-ISIS offensives in 2013 in the Jazeera and Anbar deserts, and these operations failed. The Jazeera and Badia Operations Command (JBOC) tasked with this mission is currently stationed at al-Asad Airbase in Anbar as of April 2015, conducting operations between Hit and Haditha.
Once the Anbar Operations Command is strong enough to resume this mission, the JBOC or other Iraqi forces should instead focus upon patrolling the desert areas near Iraq’s cities where the desert begins, blocking ISIS’s access to urban areas and reduce its ability to attack cities from multiple axes. The JBOC can also use Iraq’s belts to limit ISIS’s lateral movement, especially by interdicting desert routes that run parallel to the former Route Phoenix, the highway that connects Baiji to Haditha and the Muthanna Complex road.
This effort can be augmented with coalition air support, but desert security requires a ground interdiction strategy augmented by US aerial reconnaissance to limit ISIS’s access to cities. The JBOC will need to defend Iraq’s borders ultimately, but it will fail to achieve operational effects in the near term if it orients far away from Iraq’s cities.
Someone must also clear Syrian cities along the Euphrates. No ground forces in Iraq or Syria are prepared for this mission, not the JBOC, not the Syrian opposition, and not the Assad regime.
If the Iraqi Security Forces or trained Syrian rebels undertake it, ISIS will likely attack forward at Baghdad, Aleppo, and other places with terrorist attacks. Not only will these anti-ISIS forces fail to clear and hold the cities farthest from established security zones, but they will also incur operational losses on their own defensive fronts as ISIS projects attacks as a means to divert attention from its core defenses.
Clearing the cities along the Syrian stretch of the Euphrates will likely require additional ground forces. Otherwise ISIS’s physical caliphate will remain intact, states will fail to reestablish sovereignty within their borders, and ISIS’s strategic defeat will become much harder to attain.
ISIS’s operations in Iraq and Syria can be de-linked at Raqqa. ISIS can be divided by ground forces that enter at Kobane and exploit ISIS’s weakest physical links between Raqqa and northern Aleppo. Raqqa lies between the Jazeera and the northern Euphrates system at the Syrian-Turkish border. Northern Aleppo varies drastically from ISIS’s positions east of Raqqa, and ISIS’s warfare west of Raqqa varies accordingly.
Anti-ISIS forces that break ISIS’s ground war into its eastern and western fronts will reduce ISIS’s ability to synchronize its effects on both fronts in the future. ISIS in Syria can further be de-linked between Raqqa and northern Aleppo along the upper Euphrates. ISIS will still be able to operate on both fronts in parallel, but their synergy is an important capability to constrain. It is also valuable to rupture ISIS’s projected image of a contiguous caliphate by slicing its domain in two. A divided ISIS will be easier to defeat operationally.
The “Hold” forces have to hold as well. Clearing ISIS from cities is necessary but insufficient to prevent ISIS’s return. The cities have to be rebuilt, re-populated, and re-secured.
The Hold phase following anti-ISIS clearing operations is vital to the strategic defeat of ISIS. Destroyed cities with displaced populations that cannot return and prosper would translate to victory for ISIS. Intermediate investments in military counter-offensives will be wasted in this case.
ISIS will likely outlast the storm, expending fewer resources, and return when there is less anti-ISIS capability and will to resist. The rebuilding of Iraq and Syria are part of the anti-ISIS mission, not only to hold the terrain from ISIS, but also to prevent a lateral escalation between Arab States and Iran elsewhere in the region.
Displaced Persons are a lasting vulnerability as well. ISIS and other threats, including Jabhat al-Nusra, benefit from the malaise of internally displaced persons and refugees that lose faith in the modern states that have failed to secure their well-being. Particularly when displaced persons receive shelter from neighboring states or within urban capitals such as Baghdad, their presence also creates vulnerabilities to infiltration by ISIS and other violent groups seeking to radicalize or terrorize.
Anti-ISIS forces must consider how to reestablish conditions for displaced populations as means to mitigate this vulnerability. It is also necessary to reinforce the integrity of states for the generation that is being raised without a home or a national identity.
For the immediate battle plan in 2015, Mosul is a valid operational priority. Iraq must reclaim it before ISIS destroys it. Recapturing Mosul will not be the end of the war against ISIS, however. How ISIS fights for Mosul will indicate whether ISIS in 2015 will behave more like a state, such that ISIS will fight hard to prevent its capture; or rather, in keeping with the argument of this report, ISIS will revert to the behavior of an insurgency that intends to win by drawing the ISF into a long urban battle and continuously evading defeat elsewhere.
Avoiding this trap is also a reason to delay the Mosul operation to ensure that the ISF is set up for success before launching on a one-way mission. The significance of Mosul to ISIS is tempered by its other claims, and this is a risk to the current anti-ISIS strategy if it proceeds linearly to reclaim individual cities, even Mosul, before ways to get ahead of ISIS’s next moves. Mosul is instead an opportunity to constrain ISIS’s operations on other fronts and open more opportunities to challenge ISIS elsewhere, cornering and overcoming its deliberately flexible campaign.
Achieving successes against ISIS will require awareness of what flexible options ISIS retains at each phase. It is vital to the success of the anti-ISIS campaign not to suffer surprise in later phases by mischaracterizing ISIS’s use of hybridized forms of warfare as degradation. ISIS has suffered battle damage, and ISIS’s military capabilities have likely been degraded, but shifting to the defense and to less sophisticated styles of war is not a clear sign that ISIS is on a path to defeat.
ISIS may use its lower profile forms deliberately to outlast its enemies, especially the US, to reestablish control in later phases. It is nevertheless critical to remove ISIS from the cities under its control as a main objective now, given that ISIS is destroying them over time. This is not an easy or short task, and time unfortunately favors ISIS’s expanding control and adaptation.
As a terrorist group, ISIS will likely remain in the way that its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) did, by retreating into desert safe havens and across state borders should all else fail. The minimum threshold for ISIS to remain an organized violent group that can reconstitute is imperceptibly low, especially given the widespread nature of global jihadists seeking affiliation and networks today.
The US mission to destroy ISIS may tolerate this resilience if indigenous security solutions are established that prevent ISIS from overrunning state military infrastructure, seizing cities, or terrorizing populations in ways that spark sectarian civil wars.
AQI developed the capacity to do all of these things in Iraq in 2012-2013. There were exogenous factors, such as Nouri al-Maliki’s authoritarianism and the civil war in Syria that contributed to ISIS’s rapid growth and the reduction of barriers to its entry, a pale reflection of the challenges facing the Iraqi state in 2015. Limited remnants of ISIS can regrow the organization to full strength in the future. The anti-ISIS campaign therefore requires either eradicating ISIS more fully or establishing better conditions for state security than Iraq and Syria combined could muster in 2013.
A final strategic assumption threatens to undermine all anti-ISIS activities. ISIS will prevail if competing states are destroyed.
Syria is now largely destroyed in 2015. There is no legitimate government to back that will end the war and also secure the whole of Syria. The armed opposition seems to prefer Jabhat al-Nusra at the helm, despite its al-Qaeda affiliation, over Bashar al-Assad. The minority populations in Syria still largely support Assad because they fear annihilation under a Salafi-jihadi society.
Syria cannot be surgically supported through airstrikes and train and assist missions alone when Syrian society has lapsed into such chronic disorder.
Syria before 2011 is gone. The loss of Syria as a state will allow ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Iran to claim the land and the people that had once belonged to Syria for their own claims. Even a long string of military victories over ISIS will be insufficient to defeat the organization if Syria is left to this fate. Iraq can be the operational beachhead to challenge ISIS, and the model for state recovery, but it will not solve or contain Syria’s disorder.
Indeed, the ground war against ISIS will only succeed if it is part of a strategy to rebuild both Iraq and Syria.
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