The end of ISIS in Raqqa

From Robin Wright in the New Yorker:

History will record that the Islamic State caliphate—a bizarre pseudo-state founded on illusory goals, created by a global horde of jihadis, and enforced with perverted viciousness—survived for three years, three months and some eighteen days. The fall of Raqqa, the nominal isis capital, was proclaimed on Tuesday by the U.S.-backed militia that spearheaded the offensive, a coalition of Kurdish and Arab militias advised by U.S. Special Forces....

“Only a fool would call this a victory,” Hassan Hassan, a co-author of the best-selling book “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror,” told me. “It’s only the expulsion of isis fighters from a wasteland. It’s not a victory, not only because of the destruction. It’s also not a victory because there’s a shameless lack of a political track to supplement the military track. That’s the Achilles heel of Operation Inherent Resolve. They don’t have a political vision about what will happen after isis.”...

“You need to turn these areas into something better than isis, better than what people have seen over the past three years. That’s on the micro level,” Hassan told me. “On the macro level, regardless of what the U.S. says, there’s no appetite to do something to resolve the Syrian conflict, with Assad—the core problem.”

Unlike Mosul, which returned to Iraqi sovereignty automatically after isis was defeated, Raqqa will be contested. U.S. officials insist that the local population—particularly Sunni Muslims—do not want to be subjected to the rule of the Assad dynasty, which is Alawite. Legally, however, Raqqa is still part of Syria, and Assad is likely to be backed in any claim to the area by his powerful Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese allies.

So the isis caliphate may have faced an ignominious defeat, but the Syrian quagmire is far from over. And that may eventually fuel the flames of new dissent, angry new forms of opposition and, potentially, other manifestations of extremism.

Comments

[John the Drunkard]

How can ISIS be defeated, if its opponents refuse to acknowledge that it is a RELIGIOUS movement? Annexing and losing territory, raising armies and consigning them to slaughter etc. does not address the heart of the matter: the ongoing rise of militant Salafist Sunnism that leads back to Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood.

[Martin Adamson]

I disagree, this is important religiously. In Islamic theology a genuine Caliph has to fulfil certain prophetic conditions, and suffering humiliating defeats at the hands of Satan's Minions is not one of them. Obviously some of the survivors will regroup and start again, so we can't slacken, but this is a genuine victory.