Bang on target: US air power has been crucial to the recent recapture of IS-held territory © PA
Frightened by the rapid and brutal success of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, its opponents have buried their differences to fight their common enemy. But could it be too little, too late?
The Middle East is in serious tormoil, caused by the sudden rise of a sickeningly violent, but highly effective jihadi movement, the Islamic State (IS). Over the last two months it has captured a third of Syria in addition to the quarter of Iraq it had already seized in June (including the city of Mosul, the second largest in the country).
The movement’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has declared IS territory as a new Caliphate and its borders are expanding by the day. It now covers an area larger than the UK and is inhabited by at least six million people, a population larger than that of Ireland.
The very speed and unexpectedness of the group’s rise made it easy for Western and regional leaders to hope its downfall might be equally sudden and swift. But it has become clear this isn’t going to happen. Brought together by this terrifying common enemy, a coalition of the US, Iran, the EU states (including the UK), Saudi Arabia, Turkey and, in Iraq, Shia, Kurds and anti-Isis Sunni are now attempting to fight back.
Their first task was political. Under pressure from the Americans, a new government has taken office in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. It replaces that of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shia Muslim who governed Iraq corruptly and for the benefit of his coreligionists. This was certainly one of the reasons for IS’s success: Iraqi Sunnis throughout the country were unwilling to fight for or support such a discredited government. The hope is that the new government can gain the confidence of all Iraqis, Sunni, Shia and Kurds.
The second task was military, to support those forces capable of taking on IS. The Peshmerga, the Kurdish fighting force in the north, have had considerable success against IS and are now being armed and supplied by the French. The US has been happy to support the Peshmerga with air strikes from its aircraft carriers, but less so those highly effective Shia militias which are allied to Iran, the great Shia power in the region.
Uneasy allies
Some say that the military successes recapturing towns in the last week show that many different groups can make common cause against such an appalling enemy. Their various disagreements can be dealt with later after IS has been defeated.
Other say that this coalition is too unstable to succeed, with too many irreconcilable differences. Eventually IS can only be defeated in Syria and that will require cooperating and supporting the bloodstained government of Bashar al-Assad, which most of IS’s enemies, and particularly the very many Sunnis persecuted by him, will be very unwilling to do.
Allah protects Somaliland
Lecturer: Abdulkhaliq Mohamed sheikh Osman – Birmingham uk
