By Roman Quaedvlieg
The Ides of March
Has Daesh been defeated? That depends on the eye of the beholder, and if the beholder is the US President on the cusp of his 2020 re-election campaign then the answer is a resounding yes. On the other hand, if the beholder is the recently re-emerged and mercurial founder of Islamic State – Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – then the answer is disdainful scorn.
The ides of March was indeed foreboding for the last stalwarts of the IS corps. Herded by Coalition forces into their final stronghold, a sliver of land on the northern bank of the Euphrates river near the town of Baghouse, they fought a symbolic and futile resistance. Brutal as when they were when they overran Mosul in the summer of 2014, their last defence was defined by past behaviour through the callous use of women and children as shields.
The allies broke into a victory song when the last Daesh fighters surrendered – a song which reverberated around 79 countries representing the coalition against Islamic State. And it is a form of victory indeed. One to be celebrated by all civil societies, but has the war against Daesh really ended? The retaking of the IS proto-state is a major battle victory, however, Daesh doesn’t define success by a series of battles won or lost. Instead, it views its struggle as a perpetual campaign to achieve ideological ascendancy over apostates and is mature enough to understand that it can achieve that objective from any number of alternative futures. This is the fatal flaw in the presumption that a territorial defeat of IS equates to an absolute defeat of IS.
Proto-state to Guerrilla Warfare
Daesh’s transition from fighting a two-year defence of its seized territory to an insurgent guerrilla war has been frightening in its immediacy and its seamlessness, testament to its efficacy as a terrorist ideology irrespective of its operating mode. While Coalition forces have captured thousands of Daesh fighters, thousands more have escaped or blended back into the communities to fight another day.
Analysts have identified reforming cells in the deserts, mountains, and provincial centers. Those fighters are mounting asymmetric assaults on coalition forces and civic infrastructure. These guerrilla attacks are unpredictable, stealthy and lethal, having the advantages of mobility, concealment, and surprise. They don’t yet have central leadership, but they don’t need it right now – they know their task is to cause maximum fatalities and disruption while they wait for the Daesh leadership to reform its future operating model. Al-Baghdadi’s fate until recently was uncertain; then he suddenly appeared in a propaganda video demonstrating his own ‘proof of life’ by discussing the last stand at Baghouz and claiming the bombing attacks in Sri Lanka as revenge for Islamic State’s territorial defeat.
Daesh’s war chest is well stocked. It is one of the most solvent terrorist organizations in the world with billions of dollars at its disposal, greedily accrued through conquered assets, particularly oil and gas fields, during its reign. Significant portions of its wealth, estimated at US$6b in 2015, are known to have been expatriated from the region into global holding funds as a contingency for the very circumstances IS now finds itself in – rebuilding for a resurgence.
Far-Flung Battlefields
Outside of the region, other IS battlefields are inevitable. Many thousands of the 40 000 foreign fighters who flocked to the region to join IS were killed in action, but many thousands have now fled, either to their home countries or to other restive hotbeds like the Islamic Maghreb in North Africa or the Southern Philippines. This Foreign Fighter cohort is dangerous. Its members are likely to be more radicalized, battle-hardened, have war-fighting skills and will foment unrest.
The bombings in Sri Lanka are a reminder of this danger – a country barely recovered from an internecine civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils, with a nascent tension brewing between Buddhists and the Muslim population, was a ripe target for Daesh to sow twin seeds of discord and terror. Its tentacles reached into Colombo, proving Islamic State is far from defeated. The failure of the Sri Lankan security apparatus to detect the plot pales into insignificance compared to its catastrophic negligence in ignoring specific intelligence about the attack in the lead-up to the conflagration.
Sri Lanka is a salutary lesson for countries around the world and starkly demonstrates that Daesh has not been eradicated by proclamations of territorial victory. Indeed, it thrives – nourished by the ideological divisions besetting our global political discourse and fertilized by extremist counter-atrocities such as the massacre in the Christchurch mosque.
Future States
The conclusions to be drawn are simple, but the solutions are not: Daesh will be fighting a guerrilla war in the Middle East for the foreseeable future. Its virulent ideology has globally metastasized, spreading through propaganda and returned foreign fighters. Attacks orchestrated and funded by Daesh will continue to occur in global locations on ‘apostates’.
Where does this leave authorities in this fight?
Scenario one is the traditional approach of kinetic force, fighting for territorial control and the maintenance of a suppressive security architecture. It is clear this model is only partially effective and extraordinarily expensive. Neither does it deal effectively with an ideology which is enduring and simply morphs into different forms.
Scenario one is a pre-cursor to scenario two, where the application of force and pressure in one geographical location leads to a displacement effect – the ‘bubble problem’ – where Daesh emerges in loci where there is less suppression. We see this phenomenon occurring right now, with recent attacks around the world in locations not previously thought of as high-risk targets, such as Sri Lanka. Police agencies have long grappled with the displacement effect in combatting crime – saturating an area and killing off crime, only for it to pop up elsewhere.
Scenario three is the only scenario which will ultimately be effective, and that is one that deals with the here and now as well as the future. The here and now is hyper-alert security and intelligence apparatuses, pre-emptive tactical actions and unprecedented levels of collaboration between agencies and communities which will provide a semblance of strategic constraint over a mushrooming Daesh; but attacking the spreading ideology over the long-term is essential.
There is no simple radiation solution, however – it will take a sustained regimen of counter and de-radicalization; a staple diet of moderate thought and rhetoric; and a collective exercise program to build up the necessary resilience to immunize our society to this ideological cancer.
Which brings us back to the question: has Daesh been defeated? Mark Twain would have quipped in retort, “The reports of Daesh’s death are greatly exaggerated’.
Roman Quaedvlieg was most recently the head of the Australian Border Force responsible for Australia’s border operations, maritime security and immigration enforcement. He has over 32 years of experience as a practitioner and leader in policing, counter-terrorism, intelligence, trade and immigration holding senior roles in the Australian Federal Police and being integrally involved in Australia’s federated counter-terrorism arrangements including as Chair of both the Operational Response and CBRN Committees. He is now the Principal Consultant of RAQ Consulting
