PHOTO: The leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
Christoph Reuter writes for Spiegel Online:
“It was a terrible night. We heard the roar of the jets, the detonations. Then, the power suddenly went out and everything sunk into darkness,” the young woman on the phone says. She said that she could only see the flashes from the explosions, with one bomb landing right near where she was. “But I don’t want to die after all that we have already gone through here.”
The woman is from Raqqa, where Islamic State has its headquarters in Syria. She lives there together with her parents and brothers. Still. As do so many other civilians. On the phone, she was describing the first wave of attacks in the “war” that French President François Hollande declared against Islamic State following the attacks in Paris. The bombs dropped by French fighter jets hit both used and abandoned IS bases, the former army camp of Bashar Assad’s Division 17, the polyclinic, the horse racetrack and a main power cable. The woman’s brother is a taxi driver, and he witnessed numerous injured fighters being brought to the hospital, which had been closed to civilians.
Still, the raid isn’t likely to have hit any Islamic State leaders. The air strikes over the weekend were apparently an attempt to kill Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is thought to have been a key figure behind the Paris attacks and who the French initially thought might be in Raqqa. He was ultimately killed in Wednesday morning police raids in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis.
But the upper echelons of IS have been living for months in the city’s densely populated residential areas and are careful to keep their movements inconspicuous. As such, they have likely been able to escape the US-led coalition’s airstrikes, which have been ongoing for 15 months.
The attacks in Paris, Beirut and Ankara, and the bombing of the Russian Metrojet flight over the Sinai Peninsula, have shown the people around the world just how vulnerable they are. That is not quite as true, however, for the authors of those attacks: At the most, airstrikes have weakened Islamic State, but have certainly not defeated it. Hollande has declared a war that is almost impossible to wage.
ISIS’s Capability
The French jets had hardly landed before US President Barack Obama issued a rejection of any more involved forms of warfare. Sending ground troops into Syria or Iraq, he said, would be a mistake. US Security Advisor Ben Rhodes told SPIEGEL: “It’s not simply a reluctance to commit ground forces. It’s a belief that that’s not a sustainable approach.”
In the aftermath of Paris, the question as to how we can best oppose Islamic State has become more urgent than ever. But to answer that question, we need a clear idea as to what strategy the jihadists might be following. The idea that the attacks were the desperate actions of a collapsing group of apocalyptic extremists isn’t consistent with the military situation on the ground, nor with the organization itself. It’s also implausible that the attacks took place now because the opportunity only just now presented itself.
Because whatever Islamic State has done in recent years, whether taking control of cities or conquering entire regions, it has only launched offensives after thorough preparation and at moments when success seemed most likely. An organization that was able to deploy 23 armored trucks full of explosives, heavy artillery, and mustard gas merely for a September attack on two small Syrian cities certainly has the military and financial means, as well as the expertise, to launch attacks elsewhere as well.
Previous assassinations of rebel commanders and journalists outside of Syria and Iraq have revealed a pattern: IS smuggles sleepers in over an extended period, or recruits them locally. It then only activates them months later — and the murderers are often close confidants of their victims. Since 2013 at the latest, Islamic State has been able to infiltrate enemy forces, such as Kurdish militias which logically suggests that IS may have established several cells in Europe that are simply waiting for the signal to strike.
Only now, it would seem, does the terror group seem to believe that attacks in the West, which it has long been threatening, carry more benefits than costs. Europe has become more fragile recently, not least because of the acceptance of more than a million refugees, and has become more open to prejudice, panic and political polarization. This is exactly the vulnerability that the terrorists apparently aim to exploit. The fact that an intact (though probably fake) Syrian passport was found near the bodies of one of the suicide bombers is likely no coincidence. Suddenly, all Syrian refugees are viewed as potential terrorists — just as IS had hoped.
Establishing an Islamic State
The Paris attacks were logistically complicated operations with at least eight terrorists striking at several locations in the city. They likely prepared the attack over an extended period of time, avoiding attention all the while. But it was also a relatively simple attack from a technical standpoint. The terrorists targeted unsecured restaurants and a concert hall — and proved unable to breach the security at Stade de France.
Prior to the latest attacks, the prevailing theory was that Islamic State wasn’t perpetrating terror attacks abroad because it was unable to do so. That was a mistake stemming from a misunderstanding by terror experts, politicians and journalists that Islamic State would ascribe to al-Qaida’s ill-conceived notion that terror by itself would lead to the collapse of Arab regimes from Saudi Arabia to Egypt as well as to the dissolution of the United States.
But al-Qaida’s prediction was very wrong. Both the attack on tourists in Luxor in Egypt as well as the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the US engendered swift and severe responses. In Egypt, the response resulted in the collapse of violence-prone Islamist groups while al-Qaida was driven out of Afghanistan following 9/11.
Al-Qaida believed that the masses would rise up to support them, which never happened. The idea of resurrecting the global Islamic empire may have existed as a vague utopia, but the group wasn’t sure how to get there. Al-Qaida never had a military strategy for the conquering of territory, no plans for taking entire cities and no ideas for establishing control over reliable sources of revenue.
Islamic State, by contrast, aimed to establish a state from the very beginning. That goal is part of the group’s DNA. The fact that it long avoided carrying out massive attacks in the West was wrongly interpreted as weakness. But IS had merely reversed the priorities long held by jihadists. Attacking central state power with terror had consistently failed, first in Egypt and most recently in Iraq. That is where IS was born roughly a decade ago, originally as a collection of Iraqi and international radicals before being joined by officers from the Iraqi military and secret services, both of which were disbanded in 2003.
These men, whose formative years were spent preserving Saddam’s power, took over leadership of Islamic State in 2010 and transformed the group into the calculating and successful military monster we know today. Since then, the terror group repeatedly demonstrated its ability to change and adapt. When its first attempt at military expansion failed in Iraq in 2008, it transformed itself into an elusive and fearsome mafia organization in the northern Iraqi trade metropolis of Mosul, living off of protection money. All companies, supermarkets and restaurants — even pharmacies and real-estate agents — were systematically extorted, with murderous thugs dispatched to collect the money. According to US estimates, Islamic State was able to take in some $12 million each month in Mosul alone.
