Abhijit Iyer-Mitra
As momentous as the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi sounds, let's be clear, its impact on the region will be minimal to non-existent. To understand why, we need to look at the genesis and trajectory of this group and Baghdadi himself.
There's no diplomatic way of putting this, but the genesis of much of what we see today happening in West Asia started with the phenomenally misguided move by US Viceroy to Iraq Paul Bremer disbanding the Iraqi Army and ‘deBa'athifying’ the Iraqi civil services in 2003. Overnight the Americans threw around 10 per cent of the population: educated, armed, trained and networked elements of a Sunni minority regime hiding behind the figment of secular Ba'athism, out on the streets.
Within months this corpus of disgruntled people turned to insurgency and provided fuel for a whole host of Sunni majoritarian terrorist groups. As the insurgency progressed, the area of lawlessness in Iraq's Sunni belt increased, and was compounded by the vacuum of American withdrawals and the Syrian Civil War starting up in 2011, creating another large vacuum.
In this background, we have the emergence of ISIS, then named Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (JTJ) founded as an al-Qaeda franchisee by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In many ways this group set the template for what ISIS became. Its main difference with al-Qaeda was that AQ was strategic but ISIS always remained tactical. It aims were short-term and immediate (getting rid of American occupation and starting and Islamic State) and its tactics were brutal.
This is where the real split with al-Qaeda happened despite both being Salafi organisations. This brutality was so great, that Osama bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri was forced to rebuke Zarqawi in a letter, telling him that his tactics would backfire and alienate Sunnis. Zawahiri was spot on, the indiscriminate killings of Sunni Muslims and general brutality it resorted to, ensured its defeat, with local Arab tribal chieftains preferring the US to Zarqawi.
Over time and under a nebulous leadership, the JTJ morphed into ISI (Islamic State of Iraq) and finally ISIL/S (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant/(Al)Sham). What is important though is the group had exhausted its goodwill and had been decimated in Iraq, found new pastures in Syria, attempting to recreate its failed Iraq model.
The difference this time was its new leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, though liberal hagiographies portray him as being radicalised by his incarceration by US forces in Iraq, Rukmini Callimachi's ground investigation shows he arrived pre-radicalised and ended up radicalising fellow inmates. In fact he ethnically cleansed his own tent, encouraging fellow Sunni inmates to kill Shias, all under American watch.
During this period, several alleged experts have tried a spurious hair splitting of the differences between AQ and ISIS. Indeed there are differences and indeed in some cases there have been vicious and murderous clashes between the two. However, this has more to do with their conflicting criminal nexuses and territory control, than any fundamental philosophical point, micro-balancing and forming and breaking alliances of convenience.
Indeed, if Turkey could go from shooting down a Russian aircraft and its allies desecrating the bodies of the pilots, to becoming Russian allies, why is this possibility excluded for AQ and ISIS? For example, when bin Laden was killed in May 2011, Baghdadi announced he would seek revenge. He started a wave of bombing just three days later and continuing till August that year.
The question is what does Baghdadi’s death bode for the region?
To be clear, ISIS, like its predecessor JTJ, is an idea which will wax and wane depending on conditions. As long as AQ exists, this membership will remain interchangeable for three reasons: One, that unlike AQ, ISIS developed a highly-decentralised bureaucracy that was designed to withstand the elimination of its leadership. Consequently ground commanders can form localised alliances of convenience. Two, though AQ is much more centralised (which is why the discussion of who bin Laden's successor would be was germane) it follows a franchise model, allowing franchisees the freedom to form similar alliances of convenience, and; Three, since the primary difference between AQ and ISIS is that AQ is strategic and ISIS is tactical, depending on how exhausted/disillusioned one is with one group, s/he can switch to the other.
While it is clear that this is the beginning of the end of the Syrian Civil War, with an Assad victory on the horizon, the threat and impact of relict AQ/ISIS will continue far into the future. Further power vacuums, and nonsensical categorisation of ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ ‘rebels’ will only help these terrorists.
Moreover, given the debilitating demographic impact on Syria, the creation of a heavily-criminalised conflict economy and heavy radicalisation of an already brutalised population, the ‘new normal’ will remain violent for some time to come.
Abhijit Iyer-Mitra is a defence economist and senior fellow at Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi. Twitter: @iyervval. Views are personal.
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