ISIS Jihadist Movement and U.S Policy

In 2011, the official departure of American troops from Iraq opened a new chapter in that nation’s history following the US invasion in 2003 and the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein. The first few years of that new era, however, were tumultuous and violent. In Baghdad, charges of political corruption and ineffectiveness as well as alienation and persecution of non-Shiite groups continue. Meanwhile, the Iraqi military continues an extremely slow development and lacks the technology, infrastructure, and training to ensure national security.

In the absence of a strong Iraqi government and military, the country has suffered extensive sectarian violence and terrorism. In particular, one extremist organization, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL), took root in northwestern Iraq and northeastern Syria beginning in 2013. ISIS was noted for its brutality against other ethnic and religious groups in Iraq, and the Shiite-majority government in Iraq demonstrated little ability to quell the rapidly expanding ISIS insurgency. At its height in late 2015, ISIS controlled huge swaths of territory in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq, encompassing millions of people.

In light of Iraq’s inability to defeat ISIS and the threat to regional security ISIS posed as it pressed its campaign, Iraq’s government looked to the United States for assistance. That assistance included US-led airstrikes against ISIS targets in northern Iraq, the return of a small number of US military advisers to Iraq to help train the military, and humanitarian assistance for affected Iraqis. In September 2014, the United States and a handful of Arab countries began launching airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria. In November 2015, a small number of US special operations forces began to be deployed to Syria to assist moderate Syrian rebels fighting ISIS in that country's complicated civil war. By 2016, ISIS had lost significant territory in Iraq and Syria due to US-led operations, and by the end of 2017, US military officials said ISIS had lost 98 percent of the territory it once held. However, as of 2018 ISIS continued to enjoy allegiance from affiliates in Afghanistan and Africa, among other regions, and continued to issue calls for independent terrorist attacks on Western targets. American intervention against ISIS has also raised questions about Iraqi and Syrian sovereignty and the return of US military personnel and technology to an already unstable Middle East.

Understanding the Discussion

Al-Qaeda: A global network of jihadist terrorists.

Caliphate: An Islamic state ruled by a supreme religious and political leader who is viewed as the successor to the prophet Muhammad.

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS): A jihadist terrorist organization operating in northwest Iraq and eastern Syria; also called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Islamic State, or Daesh.

Kurds: A minority ethnic group residing mainly in the transnational Kurdistan region, covering parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Armenia.

Yazidis: A religious minority group of Kurds residing primarily in northern Iraq.

History

The group widely known as ISIS owes its history to two conflicts in neighboring nations. The first of those crises is the decade-old struggle for power in Iraq. Jordanian-born radical Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, while training in Afghanistan with the infamous al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, made a pivotal decision to leave during the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan and relocate to Iraq. There, in light of his relationship with bin Laden, Zarqawi became a focal point of American intelligence. US president George W. Bush and his advisers concluded that Zarqawi was an agent of al-Qaeda, a presumption that was among the factors that convinced Congress to authorize Bush to send troops into Iraq to topple dictator Saddam Hussein.

However, Zarqawi, who followed a radical brand of Sunni Islam, intended to create a new organization, separate from al-Qaeda. His Party of Monotheism and Jihad (in Arabic, Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, or JTJ) would focus on Shiite Muslims, historical adversaries of Sunnis. JTJ bombed Shiite mosques and attacked unarmed Iraqis. Those attacks worsened when the United States toppled Hussein and had him replaced with a Shiite-led government. With Sunni ire focused on the new government, Zarqawi’s popularity grew considerably, even earning the approval of bin Laden, and around 2004 his group became known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Two years later, he was killed by a US airstrike.

Zarqawi was dead, but his movement—which became known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI)—continued, along with its campaign of violence against Iraqi Shiites. However, al-Qaeda leaders were growing concerned about the group’s brutality; before his death, Zarqawi was cautioned by bin Laden lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri about his tactics against fellow Muslims. That and similar warnings were ignored, and al-Qaeda and Zarqawi’s group eventually parted ways.

Meanwhile, beginning in 2011, unrest in Syria and a backlash against the government in Damascus opened another battlefront for the radical Sunni group. The increasingly violent measures utilized by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad against insurgents helped fuel the activity of antigovernment groups throughout Syria. ISI became active in the eastern regions of the country, soon changing its name yet again, to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and became dominant among Syrian rebel groups by 2014.

In June 2014, ISIS took another bold step: the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared the areas of northern Iraq and eastern Syria to be a single Islamic state (or "caliphate"), with himself as caliph, or supreme political and religious leader. Once declaring the caliphate, ISIS changed its name simply to the Islamic State (IS), suggesting that all other Muslim communities pay homage to IS as the one true Islamic state.

The declaration by ISIS of a caliphate has major implications, both in terms of regional security (and Western interests in that region) and the Islamic community in general. With regard to the former issue, a stable Middle East has been a top goal of the international community (although rarely in the last half century has the region as a whole experienced an atmosphere of stability). Key to the pursuit of that goal, from the US perspective, is encouraging stable, pro-democratic governments. Also essential to that effort is ensuring that those governments have the infrastructure to maintain their respective countries’ internal security (a pursuit that includes both social services and military or law enforcement capability).

In both Iraq and Syria, the accomplishments of ISIS underscore the lack of viable government and security infrastructures in those countries. In Syria, for example, experts believe that ISIS and other groups exist as a result of the Assad regime’s heavy hand against opposition groups as well an inability to engage militant terrorist groups far outside of Damascus and Aleppo, that country’s two largest cities. In the absence of an engaged government, those regions have fallen victim to competing rebel groups, including jihadists such as ISIS. In Iraq, ISIS succeeded where Baghdad simply could not reach. During the US-led effort in Iraq that ended in 2011, Iraqi and US forces engaged in an intensive struggle to oust insurgents from key cities in the north—including that region’s largest city, Mosul—only to see them fall again to ISIS when the US departure left a weak and poorly equipped Iraqi military to battle insurgents throughout that large country.

The documented brutality of ISIS against both Muslims and non-Muslims in the region (among them two American journalists and a British aid worker who were executed by ISIS in August and September 2014) has prompted the international community to call for action against ISIS. The United States—which helped train the Iraqi military and build the new government in Baghdad—has been placed in the precarious position of taking action to roll back the ISIS movement and prevent further humanitarian catastrophe and political chaos. President Barack Obama authorized US airstrikes against ISIS targets in Iraq in August 2014 and in Syria in September 2014. However, such action does not constitute policy, and the Obama administration faced heavy pressure by both Congress and the international community to forge a long-term and substantive policy response to ISIS. Through the rest of Obama's time in office, his administration’s policy regarding ISIS involved continued air strikes, deployment of US special forces, and cooperation with rebel groups on the ground in Syria.

The ISIS Jihadist Movement Today

By late September 2016, the United States Central Command had conducted more than 11,800 air strikes in Iraq and Syria (6,761 in Iraq and 5,068 in Syria), and the remainder of the coalition—which includes Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates—had conducted more than 3,400 strikes. The US air strikes have targeted ISIS fighting positions, staging areas, oil infrastructure, trucks, and tanks. As a result of the air strikes and coordination with Iraqi and Syrian ground forces, ISIS experienced a major decline in its oil revenues and lost significant portions of its territories. In September 2016, President Obama authorized an additional six hundred American troops to be deployed to Iraq to assist Iraqi forces in retaking Mosul, bringing the total number of American troops in Iraq to five thousand just seven years after all US troops withdrew from the country; Mosul was retaken in July 2017.

When Donald Trump assumed the presidency in January 2017, the United States had approximately 15,000 troops combined in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, with the bulk of them fighting in the long-running conflict in Afghanistan. Elected on a foreign policy platform of both putting America first by reducing its foreign involvements, but also of pledging to crush ISIS, Trump maintained the US troop presence abroad and was credited with hastening ISIS's decline in Iraq and Syria by delegating more decision-making power to military commanders on the ground. In August 2017 he also pledged to press the fight harder in Afghanistan, where ISIS activity was increasing alongside the indigenous Taliban insurgency; Trump declined, however, to state specifically how he would ramp up the effort in Afghanistan.

Despite ISIS losing territory in Syria and Iraq, the United Nations has warned that the group remains a major threat to global security. ISIS has continued claiming responsibility for a deadly terrorist attacks around the world, including the March 2016 Brussels bombings in Belgium, the June 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting in the United States, the July 2016 Baghdad bombings in Iraq, the May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing in the United Kingdom, and the June 2017 Tehran attacks in Iran.

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