Regional Discord Fuels Islamic State’s Rise in Mideast - WSJ
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Yaroslav Trofimov in Dubai and
- Yaroslav TrofimovThe Wall Street Journal
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- yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
Philip Shishkin in Washington
- Philip ShishkinThe Wall Street Journal
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Pretty much everyone in the Middle East is supposed to be fighting against Islamic State. Yet, the Sunni extremist group retains large swaths of Syria and Iraq and is spreading elsewhere in the region.
This isn’t because of its military might or strategic sophistication. The explanation is different: For most of the major players in the complicated conflicts ravaging the Middle East, the defeat of Islamic State remains a secondary goal, subordinate to more pressing objectives.
For some of these powers, Islamic State’s existence and its barbarism are actually useful, for now, because they serve as a lever in conflicts with more immediate and dangerous foes.
Though able to take advantage of sectarian fissures in Syrian and Iraqi societies to carve out a territory the size of the U.K., Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, isn’t strong enough to represent a conventional military threat to the region’s biggest nations.
But these countries do live in existential fear of some of their neighbors.
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A photo Oct. 3 from the Russian Defense Ministry showing Russian pilots checking their plane before a flight at their base outside Latakia, Syria. Photo: russian defence ministry press/European Pressphoto Agency
In particular, the Saudi-led bloc of Sunni Arab nations bitterly competes with Shiite-dominated Iran in what has become a zero-sum contest for influence—a contest that Russia has now entered on the Shiite side by supporting the Syrian regime.
That contest is also playing out in Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition has been battling Iran-supported Houthi militants while Islamic State affiliates strengthen their position and attack both sides.
“Everyone hates their neighbor more than they hate ISIL,” said a senior Obama administration official.
Among the powers involved in the conflict, the U.S. is probably the only one, together with its European allies, focused on degrading and eventually destroying Islamic State as a primary goal.
But that effort, too is subordinated to the Obama administration’s overriding concern about preventing American casualties. This severely limits America’s ability to help forces fighting against Islamic State. It has also given rise to widespread theories claiming that Washington, too, doesn’t actually want the group to be defeated because it supposedly seeks to perpetuate regional instability.
The gap between American objectives and means has bolstered Islamic State’s narrative of invincibility, allowing it to draw thousands of recruits.
“We have an interest in defeating ISIS, but we don’t want to do that ourselves: We want other people to go in and lose their lives in doing it,” said Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In both Syria and Iraq, the U.S. targets Islamic State leaders and facilities, and seeks to roll back the group’s territorial gains by providing air support to local allied ground forces.
The U.S., which withdrew from Iraq in 2011, sent a small contingent back after Islamic State captured Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and arrived in the outskirts of Baghdad last year. But the Obama administration refuses to allow American advisers near the front lines.
In Iraq, the U.S. is depending on militias from the autonomous Kurdish region and on the Iraqi army—which has been receiving support from Iran and operates in close coordination with the more powerful Shiite militias.
In Syria, where the U.S. is also working with Kurdish guerrillas and a hodgepodge of moderate rebels, Washington is hoping to step up efforts against Islamic State in the north, including by airdropping ammunition to Syrian Arab fighters in the area. The Pentagon recently abandoned a more ambitious program to train Syrian rebels.
In Yemen, it has provided logistical support to the Sunni coalition fighting to restore the internationally recognized president, who fled the country in March as rebel forces advanced. The U.S. Navy sent additional warships to the Red Sea in April to help interdict any arms smuggling from Iran to the Houthis.
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Yemeni tribesmen supporting forces loyal to President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi holding Emirati and Yemeni flags in Marib province, east of the Yemeni capital of San’a, on Sept. 20. The United Arab Emirates has played a big role in the Saudi-led coalition's fight against Iran-supported Houthi rebels. Photo: nabil hassan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The closest U.S. ally in the region, Israel, is largely watching from the sidelines. It isn’t part of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State and has abstained from active involvement in the Syrian war, although it shares the Sunni Arab states’ apprehension about the rising influence of the Iranian regime, which Israel views as a mortal threat.
Israel has struck targets in Syria to try to prevent the transfer of sophisticated weapons from Iran to Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, which is fighting on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s behalf.
For its part, Russia has said it shares the U.S. goal of combating Islamic State. But its actions suggest the bigger priority is preventing the collapse of the Assad regime, its longtime ally.
The vast majority of Russian airstrikes have targeted other rebel groups that stretch from al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise to the nationalist fighters backed by the Central Intelligence Agency. These groups represent the biggest direct threat to the regime, especially after they advanced this year in northern Idlib province and in southern Syria.
“Russia has put an emphasis on supporting the regime, and from there the logic is military—they help them to fight those who are making the most trouble for the government at the moment,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, head of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a Kremlin advisory body.
This follows a long pattern of the Assad regime trying to destroy the more moderate opposition groups first, so that the war becomes between itself and the extremists—making itself the lesser evil.
“Russia wants to put the international community in front of two choices: Assad or ISIS,” said Samir Nashar, a member of the main Syrian opposition body, the Syrian National Coalition.
Husam Salameh, a senior leader in the Ahrar al Sham rebel group, agreed: “The regime and its allies will never find a better card to play than ISIS.”
President Vladimir Putin lashed out at U.S. criticism that his airstrikes in Syria aren’t focused on Islamic State. “Some of our partners have mush for brains,” he said on Tuesday. “They don’t have a clear understanding of what’s happening on (Syrian) territory, what goals they wish to achieve.”
One result of Russia’s bombing, especially around the northern city of Aleppo, was to enable a recent advance by Islamic State into villages previously held by the more moderate groups.
Russian bombs struck the rebels’ position in Aleppo at the same time as an Islamic State suicide car bomb went off, said Capt. Hassan Hajj Ali, leader of the U.S.-backed Suqur al Jabal group. “We are getting hit from all sides.”
Conversely, for countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia that have long backed the Syrian rebels, the removal of the Assad regime remains, for now, more important than the destruction of Islamic State.
In such countries, “people may criticize ISIS’s tactics and ideology, but they sympathize with ISIS’s political mission, which they view as not ‘creation of the caliphate’ but ‘defeating Iran and the Shiites,’ ” said Vali Nasr, dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a former State Department adviser. “For this reason there is not a massive commitment to defeating ISIS.”
For Turkey, there is an even more pressing concern: defanging the Kurdish nationalist movement that also threatens Turkey’s territorial integrity.
Acting with U.S. air support, a Syrian offshoot of Turkey’s banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, has proven to be one of the most effective forces fighting against Islamic State.
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Syrian Kurdish militia members holding a flag depicting Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed Turkish Kurdish rebel leader, in the village of Esme in Syria’s Aleppo province on Feb. 22. Photo: Mursel Coban/Associated Press
But when the offshoot, known as PYD, seized a strip on Syria’s border with Turkey from Islamic State this year, Ankara viewed that as a reason for alarm rather than celebration. Shortly thereafter, Turkey formally entered the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State—but the vast majority of its airstrikes turned out to be against PKK positions at home and in Iraq.
“For Turkey, there is no difference between the PKK, its extension PYD, or ISIS,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday. “They are all terrorist organizations with bloody hands.”
Still, U.S. officials say Turkey’s recent decision to allow the Pentagon to use Incirlik air base for strikes against Islamic State indicates that Ankara is taking the threat more seriously, a threat that was underscored by the Oct. 10 suicide bombings in Ankara, in which Islamic State is a prime suspect.
While paying a high cost in lives lost, Kurds in both Syria and Iraq also have benefited politically from Islamic State’s rise.
Last year’s stunning advance by Islamic State and the resulting collapse of the Iraqi army allowed Iraq’s Kurdish regional government to seize the strategic city of Kirkuk and nearby oil fields.
In Syria, too, a PYD land grab in some Arab-populated areas hasn’t been opposed internationally because, after all, it is hard to oppose anyone rolling back Islamic State.
“The Kurds are taking Arab lands as war trophies from ISIS. What more evidence do you need that ISIS is a great help to the Kurds?” said Alya Nsayef, a Shiite Iraqi lawmaker.
For Iran, Islamic State hasn’t been all bad, either. In both Damascus and Baghdad, the extremist group’s spread turned Iran into a dominant, indispensable power. Following the rout of the Iraqi army last year, Iranian-guided Shiite militias now exercise real authority in the country.
Despite pledges made a year ago, the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad hasn’t moved on plans to create Sunni forces, such as the National Guard, that could fight Islamic State in the Sunni heartland.
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Shiite militia members fighting alongside Iraqi forces Friday to retake the strategic town of Baiji, north of Tikrit, from Islamic State. Photo: ahmad al-rubaye/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
“Having a strong Iraqi army means no need for Iran and its militias, and this is exactly what Iran doesn’t wish to see in Iraq,” said Ahmed al Masari, head of the Sunni bloc in the Iraqi parliament. “Iran is using ISIS to extend its influence in the area. It is the biggest beneficiary from ISIS in Iraq.”
The recent nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., also appears to have given Tehran and Moscow more freedom to maneuver and coordinate on Syria, a U.S. official said.
U.S. officials believe that Moscow’s efforts to prop up the Assad regime militarily don’t necessarily mean that the Kremlin will stand by him personally.
A potential compromise could involve a strengthened Syrian regime letting go of Mr. Assad while maintaining the power structures of the Syrian state—and keeping the opposition’s role limited.
“For us, the main question is not even Assad but the preservation of the institutions of power,” a veteran Russian diplomat said recently.
Meanwhile, the Russian military and the Pentagon, their ties frayed by the crisis in Ukraine, took more than two weeks to agree on measures to avoid an inadvertent clash in the skies over Syria, in a deal reached Friday. Russia and Israel reached a similar deal on Thursday.
Russia’s assumption of the role of principal benefactor of the Assad regime isn’t necessarily bad news for Israel, some Israeli analysts say. “Russia is not an enemy of Israel and Israel is not an enemy of Russia,” said Uzi Arad, Israel’s national security adviser in 2009-2011 and a professor at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. “There are obvious advantages of Russia and not Iran.”
The Obama administration official said that the region’s Sunni powers, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey, have underestimated the risks posed by Islamic State and other extremist Sunni groups.
Noting parallels with how Pakistan’s support for the Taliban in Afghanistan boomeranged to hurt Pakistan at home, the official said “if you lie down with the dog, you get fleas.”
—Mohammed Nour Al Akraa in Beirut and Ghassan Adnan in Baghdad contributed to this article.
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com and Philip Shishkin atphilip.shishkin@wsj.com
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