Important services have been failing because of poor maintenance. And as its smuggling and oil businesses have faltered, the Islamic State has fallen back on ever-increasing taxes and tolls imposed on its squeezed citizens.
.. The caliphate “is in more need than ever before for experts, professionals and specialists who can help contribute to strengthening its structure and tending to the needs of their Muslim brothers,” read an appeal last year in the group’s English-language magazine, Dabiq.
But that call has come up short, leaving the jihadists struggling to find people able to run oil equipment, fix electricity networks and provide medical care, former residents say.
.. Stories abound of the Islamic State putting loyal members in positions they are not qualified for. The head of medical services in one town is a former construction worker, residents said. The boss at an oil field was a date merchant, according to a former employee.
Cameron’s cunning plan for bombing Isis in Syria
8. It is important to stress that, before the decision to bomb Syria, there was absolutely no plan on how to defeat Isis.
9. And there still isn’t.
10. But something must be done.
11. And this is that something.
.. 20. We do realise that air strikes alone cannot defeat Isis.
21. But that’s all we’ve got at the moment.
ISIS After Paris
In 1945, many civil wars were concluded after about two years. By 1999, they lasted, on average, about sixteen years. And conflicts in which a guerrilla group could finance itself—by selling contraband drug crops, or by smuggling oil—might go on for thirty or forty years. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, has been around since 1964, sustained in no small part by American cocaine consumption.
.. From the American intervention in Somalia, in 1992, through the French intervention in Mali, in 2013, industrialized countries have been able to deploy ground forces to take guerrilla-held territory in about sixty days or less. The problem is that if they don’t then leave, to be replaced by more locally credible yet militarily able forces, they invite frustration, and risk unsustainable casualties and political if not military defeat. This has been true even when the guerrilla forces were weak: the Taliban possesses neither planes nor significant anti-aircraft missiles, yet it has fought the United States to a stalemate, and the advantage is now shifting in its favor.
If President Obama ordered the Marines into urgent action, they could be waving flags of liberation in Raqqa by New Year’s. But, after taking the region, killing scores of ISIS commanders as well as Syrian civilians, and flushing surviving fighters and international recruits into the broken, ungoverned cities of Syria and Iraq’s Sunni heartland, then what?
The War on ISIS: What’s the Endgame?
The United States hadn’t even entered the war yet, but it was already focused on winning the peace. The endgame was not just the defeat of the Axis powers, but also the creation of a stable global order, in which World War II would be the last world war.
.. These hawks may be neglecting the endgame because they fear that long-term thinking will deter the United States from escalating the campaign against ISIS. They are eager to obliterate the Islamic State, and they don’t want to be distracted by tough questions about, say, how Syria can be reconstructed from the ruins of war. Look too hard before we leap, and we might decide not to jump at all.
.. Even the best outcome in the Middle East won’t feel like victory. We’re looking at months or years of battling ISIS, and then years or decades of stabilizing Syria and Iraq.