Anti-ISIS coalition meeting to outline next phase of fight

Foreign ministers from countries belonging to the coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) meet in London today to assess progress in tackling the militant group which still occupies large chunks of Syria and Iraq.

"It's vital that we consider what more we can all do to tackle the issue of foreign fighters, to clamp down on ISIS' financing, to step up humanitarian assistance and continue our coordinated military campaign," said British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, who is hosting the meeting.

But although the anti-ISIS coalition is impressive, encompassing about 20 countries, there is still no consensus on what needs to be done to stabilise the Middle East.

The coalition has succeeded in its immediate objective, which was to use air power to prevent ISIS from overrunning Iraq and massacring hundreds of thousands of members of various ethnic and religious communities.

The Iraqi capital of Baghdad is no longer threatened, nor are other key cities. Meanwhile, isolated and threatened communities continue to be sustained by the largest airlift of humanitarian supplies since the operations in former East Timor during the late 1990s.

But despite these achievements, the reality is that ISIS remains in control of the bulk of the territory of Syria and Iraq which it overran last year, and continues to impose a barbaric rule involving mass executions of both locals and foreigners.

More ominously, ISIS has succeeded in portraying itself as the most radical of all terrorist movements, and its gruesome methods attract volunteers from around the world. So, while the ISIS challenge is being contained, it is far from being defeated.

One problem with the international operation is that, as military analysts warned all along, an air campaign on its own cannot liberate territory: that requires boots on the ground which no contributing nation is contemplating.

Furthermore, even the air force contributions of participating nations remain small.

The British and the French have each contributed only eight aircraft to the air campaign. And even the mighty American air force has flown only around 1,500 sorties against ISIS since September last year.

But the military tempo looks set to accelerate. French President Francois Hollande has just ordered the Charles de Gaulle, his country's aircraft carrier, to the Gulf, while the British have announced the imminent opening of a naval base in the neighbouring Gulf kingdom of Bahrain.

At today's meeting, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his British counterpart will outline the next phase, which is to train local forces so that they are capable of ejecting ISIS terrorists from occupied territories.

Courses in Jordan, run by British officers, are expected to begin by the end of March to equip Syrian opposition forces to take on ISIS fighters.

Meanwhile, the United States, which has about 2,000 "military advisers" on the ground, is planning to train 24,000 Iraqi soldiers drawn from all the country's communities. The region is also crawling with Western special forces.

But the politics of this campaign is still a hindrance. With its large, well-trained military and long border with both Iraq and Syria, Turkey is, by far, the biggest local player. But the Turks are resisting pressure to dispatch their troops against ISIS, largely because they fear the strategic void left by ISIS could be filled by the creation of an independent Kurdish state, which runs against Turkey's long-term interests.

Saudi Arabia, on its part, is much more worried about Iran's growing footprint in Iraq and Syria than about the defeat of ISIS.

Also, nations such as India worry that the West's pursuit of ISIS obscures other terrorist problems emanating from Pakistan; disquiet on this topic dominated a meeting of the UK-India joint working group on terrorism last week. All that the British hosts todaycan achieve is to mediate between such competing interests.

Nevertheless, Western military planners are optimistic that ISIS will prove to be its own worst enemy. Apart from executing opponents and imposing draconian religious rules, ISIS leaders have shown no ability to administer the territory they currently control.

The growing dissatisfaction with the breakdown of basic local services such as water and electricity, coupled with the low price of oil which means that ISIS gets far less cash for the oil it smuggles, means that, perhaps by the middle of this year, the extremist group will be seen for what it is: a collection of thugs incapable of providing a viable alternative governance in the Middle East.

Still, ISIS' final defeat will, as US President Barack Obama has frequently warned, remain "a long-term project".

This article was first published on January 22, 2015.
Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.