Daesh or the incomplete peace in Syria and Iraq (Part 1)
Almost three years after the military defeat of Daesh and the territorial loss of the territories conquered in Syria and Iraq in 2014 in its blitzkrieg, which caused it to flee to desert areas of the two countries, a series of questions remain open as to whether the current armed capacity of the terrorist organisation can once again become a sufficiently strong element to compromise the weak territorial security of the two countries. For this reason, an introduction will be made below to analyse the military defeat of Da'esh, which took place in 2019, before going into the details of its collapse as an organisation, which did not mean the disappearance of its armed capacity, but which meant that in the two countries, due in large part to Da'esh, there is an incomplete peace due to the permanent insurgency.
On 23 March 2019, the jihadist organisation Daesh was finally defeated in the Syrian town of Al-Baghuz, the organisation's last stronghold in that country, which, after weeks of siege by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), composed mainly of Arab militiamen and Kurdish militiamen, ended up defeating the jihadists and their caliphate. The victory of the military and paramilitary forces fighting Daesh meant the elimination of a totalitarian power structure, but not of the organisation, despite statements made by then US President Donald Trump on the eve of the fall of the last jihadist stronghold in Baghuz,1. But far from these declarations, the military forces on the ground remained cautious, because Daesh, from the day after its military defeat, showed no signs of abandoning the fight, but rather of continuing to operate.
A little more than a year earlier in Iraq, on 17 November 2017, the Iraqi army took the last urban jihadist stronghold in the town of Rawa, near the Syrian border2. This brought to an end four years of totalitarianism, with thousands and thousands dead and missing, millions out of their homes and entire areas devastated by the war.
After Daesh came the reconstruction and control of territory by Syrian and Iraqi army forces in their respective countries. Daesh had been defeated militarily, but not completely expelled from the territory. The flight of thousands of defeated Jihadists led them to take refuge in the most deserted parts of Iraqi and Syrian territory3 , causing terror among the population living in those places and, of course, casualties among the military and security forces through various ambushes, which meant that the total defeat of Daesh, as some said, was seen four years later as a tragic exaggeration.
According to the UN Security Council, Daesh still had between 14,000 and 18,000 jihadists4 in Syria and Iraq. They carried out frequent attacks and ambushes, as their members moved freely in desert and rural areas, but also in urban areas, taking advantage of security breaches, waging guerrilla warfare, wearing down the security forces and terrorising the local tribes into submission to their dictates.
In Syria, in the west of the country, in areas under the control of the Syrian army, there were serious attacks on Bashar troops, causing numerous losses, such as those that occurred in July 2021 in the desert of Homs, following a Daesh ambush on a truck carrying Syrian army troops, killing 11 soldiers. Repeating a similar massacre two months later, in early September, they attacked a bus carrying Syrian soldiers from the fourth division, killing 13 of them.
Meanwhile, to the east, Daesh killed what the organisation considered to be Syrian government collaborators, such as the ambush carried out in early December 2021 in which they killed ten workers returning from the Kharata oil field in the province of Deir Ezzor, also carrying out attacks against Syrian army and SDF forces. In Iraq, they targeted security forces in Diyala, Salah al-Din, Kirkuk, Nineveh and parts of the Anbar region where Da'esh operational cells carried out continuous ambushes, reviving fears among the inhabitants of these areas of a resurgence of the jihadist terrorist organisation.
In short, Daesh targeted what they understood to be collaborationists, military and security forces, with the level of insurgency at its peak.
It will be shown below how, in the previously described areas of Syria and Iraq, they maintained the insurgency, extortion and threats, causing hundreds of deaths in the four years since their defeat. Siyamand Ali, a Kurdish SDF commander, said that although they were no longer facing an army, they were facing sleeper cells of between five and ten terrorists scattered across the Ambar region. The same was true for the area of Deir Ezzor, Homs and Palmyra where more than 2,000 jihadists were organised, imposing the zakat or tax on local tribes in order to survive.5
With regard to Daesh, the military chief against the organisation, US General Paul LaCamera, stated after the fall of the last jihadist stronghold in Syria that "they are waiting for the right moment to re-emerge".6 The general also acknowledged that the military action against Daesh had not been successful. The general also acknowledged that military action alone did not guarantee victory and that efforts must be redoubled to defeat their ideology. The US expert's statements merely confirmed that we were dealing with a highly resilient clandestine organisation that would make insurgency its modus vivendi, perpetuating itself in the mainly rural areas of Syria and Iraq that it knew well.
After numerous battles since 2013, in which the Daesh had been overpowering the units of the Syrian and Iraqi armies it faced, the jihadist organisation began to suffer its first setbacks on the battlefield in March 2015. The Kurdish militiamen managed to drive Daesh out of Kobane, marking their first major defeat in Syria. Meanwhile in Iraq, the first major defeat of Daesh was in the city of Tikrit (Saddam Hussein's hometown) at the end of March 2015. Thus began the beginning of the end of the bloody caliphate proclaimed by Daesh leader Abu Barr al-Baghdadi from the Al-Nuri mosque in Mosul in June 2014.
Raqqa and Mosul, since their conquest by the jihadists, became the capitals of Daesh in Syria and Iraq, until their fall in 2017. The jubilation and joy of the citizens of the liberated provinces was not long in coming, thousands of people took to the streets with music and smoking hookahs or water pipes, forbidden by the jihadist organisation on pain of 70 lashes. Others shaved their beards and burned burqas, as in the Syrian town of Manjib, to celebrate the liberation7.
All the infantry units that fought Daesh suffered unspeakably for the collapse of their caliphate. The losses suffered by both the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Syrian and Iraqi Army units were heavy, given that the enemy was willing to kill as many of them as possible, using their most highly trained forces as suicide bombers or in their case as "Inghimasis "8 , who would infiltrate the territory of the opposing army to cause as many casualties as they did in Kirkuk or Tikrit in 2016.
Both in Raqqa and Mosul, advances were slow but effective. Daesh was aided by thousands of militiamen, snipers, mortar fire, drones and above all car bombs9 aimed at Iraqi and Syrian army units advancing through the city centre. The Syrian and Iraqi military, despite suffering heavy casualties from these terrorist attacks, were seasoned in numerous battles against Daesh over four years and knew the skirmishes and tactics used by the jihadist organisation.
Artillery also provided great support to the infantry in this type of warfare, as did fighter-bombers.
But it is impossible to conclude the sinking of Daesh without talking about the organisation's top leader, the self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who proclaimed himself from the Al-Nuri mosque in 2014.
During his caliphate there were massive violations of human rights, with thousands of civilians killed in the areas conquered by Daesh. He established the caliphate of terror, with no qualms about showing the world all kinds of murders carried out by his acolytes, the most common being beheadings, through the notorious and cruel audio-visual recordings.
After the capture of Mosul by Iraqi forces and their allies, he fled to areas controlled by Daesh, until in 2019 he managed to hide in Idlib, an area controlled by a satellite of Al-Qaeda, which mobilised to find him, given the rivalry between them.
It was during that year that he was captured, thanks to the work carried out by the CIA in contact with Kurdish-Syrian intelligence, one of the men closest to Baghdadi and with him relevant information10, which ended up triggering the US Delta Force unit's operation "Kayla Mueller", in honour of the American girl captured by Daesh in Aleppo in 2013 and who was held by the organisation, suffering all kinds of abuses until her death in February 2015, following an aerial bombardment by the Jordanian army11 in retaliation for the murder of the Jordanian military pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh, captured weeks earlier by Daesh and who was burned alive, publishing the video on the internet.
Baghdadi was killed in Idlib on 27 October 2019 when he was surrounded by US special forces and detonated an explosives belt attached to his belt, killing two children who accompanied him.
With him, a cycle would undoubtedly end, but it would not mean the end of Daesh, as the organisation would settle into a permanent insurgency. (To be continued)
Luis Montero Molina, Sec2Crime contributor
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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11. M.G. La Información (6 de febrero del 2015) El Estado islámico anuncia la muerte de la cooperante Kayla Mueller en el bombardeo jordano. https://www.lainformacion.com/mundo/el-estado-islamico-anuncia-la-muerte-de-la-cooperante-kayla-mueller-en-el-bombardeo-jordano_blirwzwvuh4m78q4kgxwb1/