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Coalition Airstrikes in Iraq and Syria: An Interim Assessment

(Washington Institute for Near East Policy) Lt. Col. Scott Vickery (USAF) - ISIS owes its survival to two factors. First, a power vacuum caused by the Assad regime's retreat from large portions of eastern Syria and the subsequent collapse of Iraqi security forces in the Sunni west of Iraq enabled ISIS to morph from a small, urban terrorist group to a de facto state. Second, the toleration of Sunni populations hostile to government forces allowed ISIS to hold large swaths of territory in both countries with relatively few fighters. These are issues that airpower cannot solve alone. As for reconstituting and reprofessionalizing Iraqi and Kurdish forces and select Syrian rebel forces, the prospects for success are mixed. U.S. efforts along those lines might eventually pay off in Iraq, but only to a limited degree. And such efforts are unlikely to bear significant fruit in Syria anytime soon, at least in part because the number of forces being trained is too small to decisively change the dynamic on the ground. Killing more ISIS fighters will not eliminate the factors that enabled the group's rise in the first place. Thus, the coalition campaign should be expanded by stepping up efforts to debunk the group's image of invincibility among local Sunni populations and exploit its self-defeating tendencies. The longer ISIS controls an area, the more its nihilistic ideology turns the local population against it, as demonstrated by recent tribal revolts in eastern Syria and western Iraq. If a tribal revolt were to succeed, even locally, it could create a powerful precedent with ripple effects across other ISIS-controlled areas. The writer is a visiting military fellow at The Washington Institute and former deputy ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) chief at the 609th Air Operations Center in Qatar.
2015-01-21 00:00:00
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