Ramadi, Palmyra show West needs new strategy to defeat Islamic State

The US-led coalition’s campaign clearly isn’t working in its present form. Here’s what needs to change.

Shia militiamen rally in Iraq’s Anbar province as part of an effort to retake Ramadi. Picture: AFP

For a while it seemed as if things in Iraq were starting to turn our way.

Early last month, Iraqi troops, Shia militias and a Sunni tribal force recaptured Tikrit, returning Saddam Hussein’s birthplace to government control for the first time since January last year. Kurdish forces stabilised their front west of Irbil, and positional warfare — patrolling, trench raids, artillery duels and occasional assaults across static battle lines — developed in the country’s north.

Coalition and Iraqi leaders spoke of an offensive in the late northern summer or autumn to recapture Mosul, the strategic anchor of northern Iraq, home to two million and under Islamic State occupation since last June.

Several Islamic State leaders allegedly were killed or wounded about the same time. A Shia militia in the Hamrin Mountains of northeastern Iraq claimed to have killed Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam’s former vice-president and leader of a Baathist force loosely allied with Islamic State. There were rumours that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, head of Islamic State, had been killed or wounded in an airstrike, and his deputy Abu Alaa al-Afri also was dead.

In an upbeat press briefing on May 15, US military spokesmen, using the Pentagon’s acronym for Islamic State, claimed “the strategy to defeat ISIL is working”.

This turned out to be a spectacularly ill-timed announcement. The same day, Islamic State captured the government complex in Ramadi — capital of Anbar, Iraq’s largest province, and the third provincial capital (after Mosul, and Raqqa in Syria) to be seized by the group.

Iraqi forces suffered another humiliating collapse, abandoning their equipment and positions ahead of the advancing Islamic State. In a repeat of the fall of Mosul almost a year ago, Islamic State troops seized weapons, ammunition, fuel and vehicles. They overran the Anbar Operations Command (a corps-level headquarters), forced Iraq’s so-called Golden Division to withdraw in disarray, and besieged the 8th Brigade base outside the town. By the end of the weekend they were in full control of Ramadi.

About the same time, al-Douri resurfaced in an audio message that referred to current events, disproving claims of his demise, while Baghdadi issued a statement indicating he remained in command and calling on all Muslims to join the conflict.

The spin doctors are already playing down the fall of Ramadi. But on the ground — where things are harder to fake — it’s correctly seen as a huge defeat.

Al-Asad air base (80km to the northwest of Ramadi and home to several thousand US trainers and advisers) is now isolated by road from the rest of Anbar, though not under siege. Iraqi forces are in disarray along the whole Fallujah-Ramadi corridor, and Haditha is the only significant city in government hands along the length of the Euphrates River west of Baghdad.

Towns such as Taji, where more than 300 Australians and 140 New Zealanders are based, are looking precarious. Assurances that trainers will remain “behind the wire” — safely ensconced in defended bases — sound less soothing now that Islamic State has seized an entire city, overrunning several such bases, less than 100km away.

The group has already consolidated its hold on Ramadi and is assaulting eastward to forestall counterattacks from a collection of Iranian-backed Shia sectarian militias, the Hashd al-Shaabi or Popular Mobilisation, now mass­ing in their thousands east of the city. The militias’ chances of taking Ramadi back anytime soon are pretty slim, given it was only coalition air power that allowed Iraqi forces to capture Tikrit, and even that took several weeks of hard urban fighting after months of preparation.

Elsewhere in Iraq, Islamic State holds about 80 per cent of the Baiji oil refinery complex, a critical infrastructure hub it has been attacking for weeks; the group already controls the surrounding town. If Baiji falls, the entire campaign to roll back Islamic State will have to be put on hold. Already, some field commanders (Iraqi and coalition) are suggesting late this year or early next year as the earliest date for an assault on Mosul.

In Syria, meanwhile, the town of Palmyra in Homs province — with its spectacular Roman ruins, but also home to several Syrian government facilities and a sizeable population — fell to Islamic State this week.

The group has seized the initiative and is dictating the terms of the conflict on both sides of an increasingly irrelevant border.

In a broader sense, the fall of Ramadi shows Islamic State has adapted successfully to the coalition air campaign, which began last August. Before then, its commanders ran a conventional war of manoeuvre, operating openly, moving by day in columns of several hundred troops, flanked by technicals (pick-up trucks carrying heavy weapons and infantry) and supported by artillery, tanks and rockets. Once the air campaign began, they dropped back into guerilla mode — small teams, civilian clothes, light weapons, moving by night, blending with the population to avoid being targeted from the air. They decentralised command and control, delegating significant autonomy to junior commanders and dispersing headquarters and installations.

This adaptation worked, allowing Islamic State to survive, rebuild and create the mid-weight force that captured Ramadi. Today, it operates in medium-sized, relatively autonomous combat teams of 20 to 40 fighters, mounted in groups of three to five armoured vehicles, with technicals reconnoitring ahead and mortars or towed artillery pieces in support. Snipers, anti-tank teams and improvised explosive device specialists are attached to each group.

These teams apply what soldiers call “combined arms” manoeuvres, operating in mutually supporting formations, with units covering one another and each weapons system compensating for the others’ vulnerabilities.

When defending, Islamic State combat teams run a mobile defence, constantly manoeuvring, counterattacking, denying areas rather than holding ground, and laying thousands of IEDs in deep obstacle belts, designed to hamper attackers and channel them into the killing area of snipers and rocket-propelled grenade ambushes. On the offensive, they move dispersed but concentrate to support each other if threatened, and can mass for major attacks such as the Ramadi offensive.

Some of these attacks have been highly sophisticated. In January, on the Kurdish front, Islamic State threw 11 teams into crossing the Zab River, using small boats, near Gwer. The attackers exploited the cover of darkness and bad weather, landed on the Kurdish-held side, seized a major bridge and massacred a security unit before withdrawing.

About the same time Islamic State launched at least 14 armour-plated fuel tankers, each carrying an enormous explosive charge, in a massed suicide counterattack against advancing Kurdish forces near Aski Mosul. Coalition aircraft and Kurdish anti-tank weapons destroyed the bomb-trucks before they could reach their targets, but the Kurds’ advance was halted — and remains stalled.

Then, after losing Tikrit last month, Islamic State applied its new approach to a major counteroffensive. As Ramadi and Palmyra demonstrate, after 10 months of coalition airstrikes the group remains more than capable of aggressive manoeuvres in both Syria and Iraq, launching co-ordinated attacks in the Baghdad belts, stepping up its assault on Baiji, conducting car bombings in Baghdad and attacking towns west and north of Baghdad. Reports of Islamic State’s demise, in short, turn out to be grossly premature.

In military terms this suggests a stalemate at best, unless Iraqi and coalition forces change their ­approach. More bluntly, the “light-footprint” formula — trainers behind the wire, supported by limited numbers of airstrikes on Islamic State battlefield targets — clearly isn’t working. Coalition airstrikes failed to save Ramadi when Iraqi forces proved unable to hold positions against a determined assault.

On the Kurdish front, though anti-Islamic State forces are holding the line, they cannot recapture ground without air support, and wherever Shia militias with Iranian advisers and weaponry have been committed, they have failed to change the equation.

Beyond these military concerns, the fall of Ramadi is a huge political crisis. As Islamic State cranked up pressure on Ramadi during the past few weeks, Iraqi politicians wanted to send Shia militias to defend the city, but coalition leaders urged them not to — in the hope that the Iraqi army and a local Sunni force from the Albu Fahd tribe would suffice to defend the city, and thus avoid the political problems associated with bringing large numbers of Iranian advisers and Shia sectarian fighters into the Sunni heartland of Anbar province.

This plan failed, and now Iraqi leaders blame the coalition for the loss of Ramadi and are determined to recover the city by any means, even at the risk of heightened sectarian conflict and alienation of Iraqi Sunnis. The conflict is thus becoming increasingly sectarian.

Since assuming power last September, Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has made genuine efforts to act in a more inclusive manner and win back Sunni support for Baghdad. The fall of Ramadi weakens him with his own Shia sectarian base and strengthens former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has been active in the Popular Mobilisation, pushing an openly sectarian, anti-Sunni line and supporting greater Iranian involvement in the conflict.

Recent events will reinforce Maliki’s disruptive role on the sidelines (and the implied threat to Abadi’s leadership), undermining the Baghdad government’s credibility and leverage in negotiations with Kurds and Sunni leaders. At the same time, Sunni communities and tribal leaders that had previously backed Baghdad, albeit tentatively, see less reason to do so.

Iraq, indeed, looks increasingly like Humpty Dumpty. Efforts to put the country back together as a unified political entity are fading, leaders on the ground are speaking of a soft partition into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions, and some on the edge of the political debate are arguing for what amounts to ethnic cleansing — driving Sunni communities out of major cities, repopulating them with Shia settlers and permanently restructuring Iraq.

A look at what Shia militias have done in places they have captured — such as Jurf as-Sakhr, outside Baghdad, or Tikrit, both now depopulated areas under Shia military occupation — shows this is more than mere rhetoric.

For their part, Iraqi Kurds, behind their stable frontline, are being treated like an independent state in terms of weapons supplies and international trainers, and are stockpiling weapons and equipment. The purpose of this build-up, in theory, is to help liberate Mosul, but it’s easy to see how Kurdish leaders would be reluctant to waste their new capabilities, or lose Kurdish lives, in recapturing an Arab city for politicians in Baghdad for whom they have little love and less respect.

At the same time, the influx of weapons and training is changing the balance of power among competing groups such as the Kurdish Democratic Party, its longstanding rival the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and the newly influential People’s Protection Units (YPG), a militia linked to the anti-Turkish Kurdistan People’s Party (PKK). It’s possible the ultimate outcome will be a better armed, less united, less peaceful, but fully independent Kurdish state, with territorial ambitions in Syria and elsewhere.

What needs to happen, then, to salvage the campaign? As I argue in a recently published Quarterly Essay, it’s not actually clear that it can be salvaged. But what is clear is that we need to start treating Islamic State as what it is — more than just a terrorist group or an extremist death cult but, rather, something that looks increasingly like what it claims to be: a state.

Islamic State controls territory and population, governs cities, levies taxes, disposes of substantial economic and military resources, and is in the process of redrawing the map of the entire Middle East through aggressive (largely conventional) military conquest.

It does have an international terrorist network as well, and its reach on social media — along with its ability to radicalise people in the West and draw recruits from across the world — is dangerous.

But its most threatening aspect of its state-like nature, which has turned a longstanding Sunni-Shia cold war into a hot conflict that is dragging in regional and global powers such as Iran, Turkey, Israel, the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Russia and, of course, the US and allies including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Britain, along with several European countries. At least five of these states are present or threshold nuclear powers, so that — in a worst-case scenario — the escalating regional conflagration centred on Iraq and Syria even carries the ultimate risk of a nuclear exchange.

Even without that, the conflict already has generated an unprecedented number of refugees and asylum-seekers across Africa and Europe.

Hence the strategic imperative now is to stop further escalation of that conflict, and, like it or not, only the Western allies — operating in accordance with international norms and with the backing of the international community — have the capacity to do that. This would make sense even if it turns out to be impossible to reunify Iraq, because the alternative of an escalating conflict would be so much worse.

Such an approach — we could call it “active containment” — would include both military and diplomatic elements.

On the military side, there’s a clear need to set aside the light-footprint approach (at least for now) and take wholehearted action to destroy those aspects of Islamic State that make it a state-like entity and that are provoking other powers to join the conflict.

This doesn’t imply invading Iraq, putting thousands of Western troops on the ground or engaging in a military occupation or stabilisation effort.

Rather, it involves a radically enhanced air campaign — on about the scale of Kosovo in 1999 or Libya in 2011 — with coalition observers and ­targeting teams on the ground, coordinating a significantly increased number of airstrikes.

This would change the air campaign in quantitative and qualitative terms. It would involve an increase from the 10 or so strikes a day that have been mounted since last August to something approaching the 45 a day of the Libyan air campaign or the 250 a day of Kosovo. This would imply better targeting, as the present low strike rate results from lack of targets, not lack of bombs or aircraft.

Qualitatively, it would see a shift of emphasis from attacking individual weapons systems, fighting positions or leaders, towards destroying the things that allow Islamic State to exercise its governance function.

One example may help illustrate this. Since seizing Mosul last year, Islamic State has used forced labour to construct a berm (essentially a sand wall and moat-like ditch) around the city. There are only a few openings, each guarded by a checkpoint. Anyone wishing to leave Mosul has to pass through these checkpoints and give the names of three friends or relatives, who become hostages to be executed if the person doesn’t return within five days. Thus a small number of operatives can hold hostage a city of two million.

A revised targeting approach could knock out the checkpoints, create multiple breaches in the berm to allow the population to leave, destroy the Islamic State governance complex in the centre of Mosul and target its headquarters at the northern end of Mosul airport. Ground forces would create a humanitarian corridor to allow the population to flee, while air power held off attempts at retaliation.

The goal would be to break the Islamic state’s ability to function as a state. This is a hypothetical, of course, but it illustrates how a shift in approach, plus increased effort, could translate into significant changes on the ground.

There’s no way this approach can work, however, unless the restrictive rules of engagement are changed to allow Western trainers and advisers to accompany partnered Kurdish and Iraqi units into battle, and engage Islamic State offensively, not just in self-defence.

Air power alone, without properly trained and advised ground units, will be just as ineffective as ground forces operating without air support have been. We need to apply the same “combined arms manoeuvre” Islamic State has been using, putting the enemy on the horns of a dilemma where massing to face ground forces makes its fighters vulnerable to airstrikes, but dispersing to avoid airstrikes means they can be dealt with piecemeal by ground forces.

This is not a hypothetical — it’s exactly how we defeated the Taliban in 2001, through a combination of massed air power (83 strikes a day on average), advisers and observer teams moving closely with supported units, and a 50,000-strong Afghan ground force. The Taliban in 2001 were structured in a very similar way to Islamic State now, fielded a similar-sized force and used similar tactics (albeit with fewer heavy weapons), so the analogy, while imperfect, is useful.

Ultimately, though, as in all warfare, the key problems here are political, not military. In Iraq the challenge is to reconstruct a functional relationship between Kurds, Shi’ites and Sunnis, and among multiple parties with divergent interests. In Syria, it’s to convince combatants on all sides that they can’t achieve their goals by continued violence and that a negotiated peace is the best alternative.

The role of military operations in both Iraq and Syria is to create the conditions that make it pos­sible to solve these political problems or, if they prove impossible to solve, at least contain the conflict and stop it escalating into a wider war. Unfortunately, as last week’s setbacks show, those conditions are further away than ever.

David Kilcullen is a former Australian Army officer and guerilla warfare specialist who served in Iraq in 2005-07 as senior adviser to US general David Petraeus, was special adviser for counter-insurgency to US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in 2007-09, and is an adviser to governments and NGOs in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Africa and Latin America. His Quarterly Essay, Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State, is out this week.