The Islamic State is growing and evolving. The strategy for fighting it? Not so much

GlobalPost

The coordination across continents, the unholy carnage, the chilling spread of terror and the unbearable spilling of so much blood in one day was gut-wrenching — exactly as intended. And it has led to the inevitable question: Is the so-called Islamic State becoming more powerful?

Last Friday, a day of prayer in the midst of the holy month of Ramadan, IS sent a suicide bomber into a packed mosque in Kuwait, killing 27 people. This cult of death also sent a 23-year-old local gunman into Tunisia’s beach resort of Sousse, killing at least 38 people, mostly tourists.

More from GlobalPost: Death toll from Islamic State's attack on Kobani rises to 223

The same day, a man tried to blow up a US-owned factory in Lyon, France, and decapitated one person, although it is not clear whether this attack was linked to IS. And — it should be clear this gruesome list is in no order of priority — IS slaughtered over 200 people in the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani, which the group took over after months of protracted fighting.

These latest incidents of grotesque violence come just weeks after the group took over Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. A year after declaring a caliphate, IS now controls an area the size of Switzerland, holding terrifying power over some six million people.

Friday’s rampage seems to indicate that IS ideology is metastasizing. As Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations and Middle Eastern politics at the London School of Economics, explains: “It is spreading, it is traveling and mutating. ... It is taking on different forms, so you have inspiration and motivation, you have organized networks, you have groups that perhaps subscribe to different notions of this ideology. It is not just one thing; it is many things.”

Earlier this month, IS spokesman Abu Mohammed al Adnani urged jihadists to “make Ramadan a month of disasters for the infidels.” The group’s calls for violent action outside of its self-declared caliphate are open requests for franchised and freelance activity in its name.

But in all of the talk of IS tactics, influence and gains, the core fact remains that the group could not possibility have survived in this fashion had conditions on the ground not supported it. In Syria as in Iraq — and beyond, in Libya — IS has exploited political vacuums, instability and the chaos of wars.

To say that there would be no IS without the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is starting to look like a terrible understatement. Dismantling the state and security apparatus and backing a leader who pursued corrupt and sectarian politics, that invasion left a legacy of chaos, instability and mistrust. That created a perfect breeding ground for groups like IS to exploit.

The textbook IS plan for takeover is to first kill off those opposing them and those deemed “apostates.” Then they start fixing things — electricity, sewage systems — and employing people and establishing some security. A recent New York Times report describes the group as “stitching itself” into the communities it controls — and notes that IS’s brutal rule isn’t all bloodlust and horror. As one laborer from IS-controlled Raqqa, in Syria, put it: “It is not our life, all the violence and fighting and death. … But they got rid of the tyranny of the Arab rulers.”

Unpalatable truths often have entirely understandable causes. If some Iraqis and Syrians say that life in the caliphate is at least stable, then that likely isn’t a sign of fanaticism so much as a reflection of the terrible conditions they were living under previously.

Moreover, IS cannot be repelled on the ground by local forces, as there is not enough trust to create a unified effort to do so. There is no reason for Sunni tribes in Iraq, for instance, to trust a sectarian-driven and repressive government that, despite a change of leadership, has shown no sign of a change of heart.

So, for instance, it doesn’t matter how many times the Iraqi government insists that the Popular Mobilization Forces are just that. To much of the population, this 20,000 strong, Iranian-backed group will always be seen as Shia militias. And meanwhile, if the government doesn’t trust the Sunni tribes within Anbar province enough to practically support them, who is going to repel IS jihadists there and keep them from returning?

We can — and have — argued about the wisdom of US-led airstrikes by a coalition of the willing, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Kuwait. Many analysts have cast the devastating attacks in both Kuwait and Tunisia last Friday as retaliation for airstrikes against the self-declared caliphate. But beyond that, the inevitable fact is that airstrikes alone can’t dislodge IS — not just because the group has adapted to them (its dead, it seems, can be replenished by recruits traveling from abroad), but because you can’t bomb places into stability. That only happens on the ground, among communities — and with leadership that can be trusted.

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