Dancing to the Salafi tune

Relentless aerial bombings of the forces of ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — after October 11 have driven them out of the besieged Kurdish city of Kobani. A massacre of civilians has, therefore, been averted. But the reprieve could be temporary. For, there is no greater clarity in the US’s strategy for combating ISIS today than there was a month ago. ISIS invaded Northern Iraq in June. But President Obama dithered over his response, claiming he only wanted to ‘degrade’ ISIS till he was goaded into taking action by the slaughter of two American journalists and two aid workers in August and September. There followed a flurry of much publicised aerial attacks on ISIS targets in and around Raqqa, but these were far from the battle zone. 

ISIS’s riposte was to turn north and race into Syrian Kurdistan and besiege the city of Kobani. In the three weeks when its tanks and guns were spread out in open fields around the city, a handful of US air attacks would have sufficed to save Kobani. But despite fervent entreaties by the Kurds, the US did not send a single plane to destroy their guns and tanks.

Only on October 6 did it finally start attacking ISIS positions around the city. But it was too little, and almost too late. On October 11, ISIS occupied 40 per cent of the city, and a slaughter of epic proportions became imminent. The ‘coalition’s’ response on that day was just nine air strikes, six of them by the US.

These did, however, boost the Kurds’ morale and stiffen their resistance. Women took up arms to fight beside their men. One became a suicide bomber and blew herself up, taking a score of ISIS fighters with her. A father of five who refused to be evacuated when he was offered the chance to go with his family left a voice message on his mobile . On October 11, the Peshmerga foiled five attempts by the ISIS to ram through its defences with armour-plated trucks carrying tonnes of explosives and driven by suicide bombers. The very next day they killed 36 ISIS fighters in an ambush. All of them were foreigners. 

What turned the battle against ISIS, therefore, was not just the intensified air strikes, but the presence of fighters on the ground who could guide the bombing and move in to hold the areas from which ISIS had been driven out. These are what the US-led coalition does not as yet have anywhere else in Iraq and Syria. Paradoxically, therefore, the victory at Kobani has served to highlight not the strength, but the weakness of US’s strategy. 

Chief among these is the unreliability of the US’s allies. ISIS has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of tanks and ammunition, and is getting fresh recruits all the time. But the Turks, the US’s supposed allies, have been doing to Kobani what the Russians did to the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto in 1944 — sit and wait till the Jews weakened the Germans. At least 40 tanks are drawn up on the edge of the bowl in which Kobani sits, just 800 metres from its northern and 2.8 kms from its southern edge. But all they have done is to seal their border to prevent Kurds from crossing it to join the battle in Kobani. 

Help is also coming only in notional driblets from the Americans’ Sunni Arab allies. Since the Iraqi army is in a shambles, and a return of American and European troops to Iraq is out of the question, Obama is putting his faith in a retrained Iraqi army and a 9,000-men new army of ‘carefully vetted’, moderate, Syrian Sunnis to be trained in Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to fight the ISIS in Syria. 

The absurdity of this proposition betrays its lack of seriousness, for ISIS already has more than 30,000 battle-hardened fighters. They would make mincemeat out of a much smaller, untried army that has never come under fire. In any case, a ‘moderate Sunni’ rebel in Syria has become an oxymoron. As vice president Joe Biden said at Harvard on October 2 in one of his embarrassing bursts of candour: “The only moderate Syrians are shopkeepers.” 

On the other hand, as the last 10 days’ fighting in Kobani has shown, aerial attacks can break ISIS’s will to fight if they are accurate and sustained. This requires armed helicopters and drones but their range is short, so they have to operate from bases close to the battlefield. Turkey has  opened its air bases to the coalition, but the closest ones are too far away, especially from central Iraq, to meet this need. The Syrian government, however, has half a dozen air bases only a few kilometres away. 

Syria also has a battle-hardened army of about 300,000 soldiers who are itching to take revenge for the brutal killings of their brethren. But to enlist Syria the US must first accept it as a partner in the fight against ISIS, and that is anathema. So Obama prefers to create a new army of 9,000 Syrian men who will fight both the ISIS and Assad in Syria! No wonder no one in Washington places an ounce of trust in what he has to say. 

Obama’s lack of a strategy does not, therefore, spring from compulsion but choice. He wants to eliminate ISIS but without  changing his allies and admitting that they were taking him up the garden path to sectarian ethnic cleansing while pretending to lead the way to Arab democracy. Above all, like most other leaders in a media-driven world, he wants to avoid having to admit that he made a mistake and backed all the wrong horses at the start of the ‘Arab Spring’. 

It simply can’t be done. Without Iranian troops to bolster Iraq, and the Syrian armed forces to hold recaptured territory and squeeze it from the rear, ISIS cannot be stopped, let alone defeated. But Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms are obsessed with blocking Iran’s rise to regional pre-eminence. And Obama can’t stop dancing to their tune. 

The writer is a political commentator