I cannot recommend too highly Dr. Craig Whiteside’s ICCT research paper, “Nine Bullets for the Traitors, One for the Enemy: The Slogans and Strategy behind the Islamic State’s Campaign to Defeat the Sunni Awakening (2006 – 2017).” For those of us who fought the war against the various incarnations of Daesh from 2003-2010, it is eye-opening to see what we did not see at the time. I personally operated in a senior targeting position with the main-effort U.S. division in Baghdad during the height of this fight, and much of what Dr. Whiteside details was unknown to me. It should not have been. We did a poor job of monitoring our enemies’ information operations and too often saw the fight in purely tactical terms–cut off the head to kill the snake. Among his other interesting ideas, Dr. Whiteside makes a plausible argument that Abu Musab al Zarqawi was uniquely unsuited to deal with the Sahwa movement, implying that his death in 2006 may have been a gift to the enemy. This dynamic played out on the Shi’a side in 2008 when we failed to kill both Arkan al Hasnawi in Sadr City and Abu Sajjad in al Rashid. Both men attempted to run their organizations from exile, creating significant opportunities and preventing the rise of more effective local leaders.
In the conclusion, Dr. Whiteside explicitly ties the resurgence of the Islamic State following the Sahwa movement to its “defeated” status now. He makes a cogent argument that recent setbacks should not be assumed to mean complete and enduring defeat. Clearly, this question is critical in light of the President’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria.
The implication need not be that we must retain U.S. forces indefinitely. Indeed, if U.S. boots on the ground are the only way to sustain a victory over enemies like Daesh, than that would tend to argue strongly against engaging in military action in the first place. The U.S. cannot sustain a decisive ground presence forever in every place it may want to fight.
It does imply that a precipitous withdrawal without a deep understanding of the current dynamics and a strong plan to sustain gains through allies will almost certainly lead to at least a local disaster. Before U.S. forces withdraw, we should be completely clear about the strengths, weaknesses, and likely future course of Daesh, and we should determine the ways and means required to continue the momentum toward their eventual destruction as an organizing force. Such an approach, with the close cooperation of our Iraqi partners, the Kurds, and the leaders of any Syrian groups required, along with clear commitments to provide those resources going forward might go a long ways towards mitigating the understandable sense of abandonment among those who have fought alongside us, in some cases for decades.
James W. Vizzard 