The Raqqa Campaign and its consequences for Syria

Image via Alalam

(Originally published on Osservatorio Mashrek)

After months of aerial bombardment, recent skirmishes outside Raqqa have indicated that the city will face an impending ground operation in the coming weeks and months. 

The aerial campaign against Raqqa has been sustained since Barack Obama authorised air-strikes in Syria against ISIS in 2014 and have intensified following the destruction of a Russian airliner, the second wave of attacks in Paris, and the attacks on Brussels. Since these attacks Britain, France, Russia and Belgium have joined the sorties over Raqqa.

The future of ISIS’s caliphate is under threat and it is unlikely that ISIS will be able to hold back the combined onslaught of ground forces supported by international air-power. However, recapturing Raqqa from ISIS presents immense challenges to international policymakers.

Firstly, local forces will be a potential headache for policymakers as they assemble different rebels groups with different objectives and agendas into an effective front against ISIS. The coalition pieced together by the Pentagon is more than likely to clash with the interests of Assad, Erdogan, Putin and other rebel groups and will be an underlying factor which may complicate the Raqqa offensive, cause it to stutter as local and regional forces fight for the claim to ISIS’s scalp in Raqqa.

This has already been on display in Iraq as Kurdish groups have frequently exchanged fire with Shiite militias despite Washington’s desire for a unified front for the push towards Mosul, ISIS’s main stronghold in Iraq. 

Secondly, the utilisation of the Kurdish people’s Protection Units (YPG) and its Arab allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) will present problems when the major offensive to recapture the city commences. According to Amnesty International, the YPG have been committing war crimes in northern Syria and cleansing Arab villages and towns of Sunni Arabs. Kurdish officials have rejected these accusations arguing that these civilians were evicted from militarised zones for there own safety.

However, the demolition of houses and reports of civilians being evicted at gun-point contradict official statements. They also come into question when the conduct of the YPG parallels reports emerging from northern Iraq that the PKK, Assyrian Christians, and Yezidi militias (ethnic Kurds) were conducting cleansing operations against Sunni Arabs in 2014 and 2015. The ethnic cleansing perpetrated by peshmerga units and paramilitary groups has been justified as revenge for the genocidal violence perpetrated against the Yezidis following the discovery of mass graves and the enslavement and rape of hundreds of Yezidi women and children.

Ethnic cleansing and resettlement is not a new phenomenon in the region and demographics have rapidly become politics in the Middle Eastern wars. However, too many militant Kurdish groups, these operations represent the next phase in the narrative of establishing Kurdistan after a century of persecution, genocide and statelessness. 

In the context of the impending offensive on Raqqa, this matters. The people of Raqqa should not only be liberated from ISIS, ‘they should be provided with guarantees against falling under the control of another extremist organisation (the Yellow ISIS) which the people of Raqqa used to call the YPG…who do not see the YPG as a lot more different from ISIS.’ It is a dilemma for the Obama administration as the Kurds are the most effective fighters available on the ground against ISIS for Western policymakers. 

Whether they are reliable allies in the long-term remains to be seen as the YPG have been happy to work with both rebel groups and the Assad regime. This ambivalent stance makes them politically unreliable, despite their recent military efficiency. It cannot be forgotten that the YPG and PKK have maintained radical ideologies, sanctify suicide bombers and legitimise the targeting of civilians which have come into conflict with moderate Kurdish political and military groups. 

In Raqqa and Mosul, ISIS holds considerable support from its population which stands in contrast to other operations in Kobane, Sinjar, Palmyra, and Tikrit. The conduct of the YPG and rebel forces and bombing of predominantly urban areas suggests that the counterinsurgency operations in Raqqa will incur high civilian casualties. The siege of Raqqa, similar to the siege of Aleppo, Homs and Hama or the battle of Ramadi, Tikrit, and Fallujah in Iraq, will be extended battles of attrition which have defined the Syrian War. 

ISIS will be cleared out house by house, street by street and civilians who remain behind will face starvation and be targeted indiscriminately by ISIS, rebel forces and airstrikes while Raqqa's civilians who flee the city are likely to become part of the wider refugee crisis affecting the Middle East. Displacement of civilians will inevitably create conditions for further violence.

According to journalists and media activists from Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, the U.S-led coalition’s bombardment of Raqqa is causing immense damage to residential areas and infrastructure. The suffering of Raqqa’s population will be catalysed by ISIS’s determination to hold onto its main stronghold in Syria which will prolong the siege of Raqqa and the suffering of civilians. 

While destroying Raqqa may convince the population to eject ISIS from the city, such a tactic (adopted by Ariel Sharon in Beirut in 1982 and Assad in Syria since 2011) will breed long-term resentment. If the political grievances and economic benefits which led to many of Raqqa’s population to support ISIS in the first place are not addressed, northern Syria will remain a key area for ISIS’s military operations.

Combining these economic and political factors to the draconian international bombings and vicious conduct of local forces, the offensive on Raqqa will exacerbate the refugee crisis and embed ethnic-nationalist and sectarian narratives. Such an outcome will not make European civilians any safer in the short-term or long-term, nor will it will bring Syria any closer to peace.

The Raqqa campaign must be carried out delicately as both a military and political enterprise, and policymakers in Washington must ensure that U.S Special Forces operating on the ground with Kurdish forces restrain actors such as the YPG. This remains unlikely as Washington has had little control over its different partners on the ground whether it be the Free Syrian Army, the YPG and Islamist factions (moderate or radical). 

It cannot be denied that ISIS’s capacity to establish a state will be dealt a significant blow. However, this was always going to be the case despite the alarmism which gripped media organisations when ISIS declared itself as a caliphate. ISIS has made too many enemies too quickly and ruled some of the most impoverished parts of Syria and Iraq.

However whether or not it holds territory will mean little as ISIS’s main strength has come from its tribal networks, oil smuggling and its decentralised economic, social and military approach. ISIS’s coalition will remain a major geopolitical actor for years so long as Syria and Iraq (two theatres of war which are inevitably linked) are destabilised.

Despite ISIS's sectarian narrative, its roots go beyond Sunni grievances against the Assad regime which is one factor in its rise across the Middle East. Addressing Sunni grievances will not solve the ISIS question as multiple state actors have a vested political and economic interest in using the ultra-violent cell as a proxy in geo-politics. 

The eradication of ISIS’s presence in Raqqa will be a step in destroying it as a sub-state, but a far cry from defeating its venomous ideology nor will it deter the group from waging conventional terrorist attacks against Middle Eastern and European targets. This was demonstrated throughout May by a series of suicide attacks against government strongholds in the coastal cities of Jableh, Tartous and Baghdad which combined has left nearly 200 dead and hundreds more wounded.

ISIS remains one actor in an immensely complex conflict and for all its horrific violence, portraying the terrorist cell and Bashar al-Assad’s regime as the sole villains in the war is an oversimplification. The intra-rebel civil war will continue and act in conjunction with the opposition’s war against the regime.

The West’s reliance on the Free Syrian Army (if such a thing really exists anymore) for years has been subject to severe scrutiny as the FSA is split into dozens of different sub-factions some of which are sympathetic to or allied to Al-Qaeda or are simply too weak to deal a decisive blow to Assad’s regime. The displacement of ISIS from Raqqa by YPG and SDF forces will invite retaliation from the Turkish military who will not want to see the militant Kurdish group benefit from more military success. In recent days Turkey has also hit out at U.S policymakers over images showing US special forces in Syria wearing insignia of Kurdish militia. 

The cooperation between the U.S and Kurdish forces in the war against ISIS is one Turkey has strongly contested. As a U.S intelligence document stated, Turkey was included in the coalition of powers which supported the possibility of the emergence of ISIS in 2012 to destabilise the Assad regime.

Alongside territorially isolating Damascus, the emergence of ISIS also presented an opportunity to isolate the Kurds and thwart attempts for militant groups to push for Kurdish autonomy and federalism in northern Syria from Assad's government.

Under the pretext of fighting terror, Erdogan’s government has waged war on domestic and foreign Kurdish groups (moderate and radical) with bombing raids in northern Iraq and Syria and viciously attempting to suppress a new insurgency unfolding in Turkey.

Raqqa's fall to a YPG-led offensive would be a major blow to Erdogan's government which has sponsored and turned a blind eye to the rise of ISIS between 2012-2014. Turkey has even benefited economically by funnelling black market oil sold by ISIS across the porous Syrian-Turkish border. This has also been an avenue through which foreign fighters have been able to join radical groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS. 

The strategy, however, has backfired on Turkey as the country stands on the brink of civil war, faces domestic insurgency, is swamped by refugees and continues to be targeted by suicide bombings while ISIS and the YPG hold more territory than ever before in northern Syria. These factors have led to widespread international condemnation in the West while Turkey's relationship with Russia has deteriorated. 

The siege of Raqqa and fall of ISIS’s strongest citadel in Syria will not herald the end of the regional war or spell the end of the terrorist organisation. The fall of Raqqa will represent a new stage in the conflict and the evolution of ISIS as a geopolitical force (capable of perpetrating atrocity and hijacking international, regional and local efforts to establish peace in Syria) as year by year the Syrian War becomes more lethal, consequential and devastating for Syria’s civilians and security of the region.

The destruction of Islamic State's caliphate will not stop Iraq from fracturing

Photo by Levi Clancy on Unsplash: Sinjar, Iraq.

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The beginning of the campaign to eradicate the Islamic State group's presence in Mosul has been defined by American policymakers as the key battle against the terrorist organisation. In his surprise visit to Iraq, vice-president Joe Biden's was in no doubt of the significance of the military operation to recapture the city.

"It’s real, serious, and it’s committed,” Biden said of the ongoing Mosul strategy, “and so I’m very optimistic.” This optimism was echoed by Barack Obama who stated in a recent interview with CBS News that the "expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall."

Raqqa and Mosul, the citadels of IS in Syria and Iraq, have been the prime targets for Western policymakers and there is a belief amongst many that the fall of each city will herald the terrorist group's defeat in a belated final battle. These expectations are deeply flawed. It will take years to uproot IS and affiliated jihadists groups from Iraq and Syria and the fresh outbreak of hostilities between the opposition (including Jahbat al-Nusra and The Islamic Front) and Bashar al-Assad's military in northern Syria only strengthens IS and prolongs its stay in Syria where its power and influence is greatest.

From there it can penetrate Iraq's porous borders, launch vicious attacks against military and civilian targets in cities and towns across the state and exploit divisions between the coalition assembled against it. This has been demonstrated by IS quite efficiently in the form of mass-suicide attacks across Iraq most notably  Hilla, Iskanderiyah, and the numerous bombings which hit the capital city Baghdad every week. The destruction of IS's caliphate by conventional warfare will succeed only in changing the dynamics of conflict in Iraq.

The fact that IS will not survive as a state should not come as a surprise, nor should its demise be regarded as a new phenomenon as John Jenkins highlights:  "nothing Da’esh does is individually new. We’ve seen theatrical brutality before. We’ve seen claims to resurrect the caliphate before: by one count, 19 jihadi proto-states (mostly short-lived) between 1989 and 2015."

The eradication of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's vision and Baghdadi's caliphate will not be a unique phenomenon and IS will continue to have the capacity to carry a local and regional threat while conducting covert operations in Europe. Coalition air-strikes will have a limited impact against urban and asymmetrical warfare.

The Iraqi Civil War is far more than the war against IS, one piece of a wider conflict, and the assortment of factions fighting for Mosul will utilise the opportunity in the war against the group to carve out their political agendas. This has already created division and immensely complex war. 

The Kurds, a crucial ally in the war against IS, have hardly concealed their ambitions. The United Kingdom has contributed heavy machine guns, half-a-million rounds of ammunition, non-lethal military equipment including body armour, helmets and ration packs while Germany, according to The American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, has already equipped Kurdish troops in northern Iraq with over 8,000 pistols, 8,000 Assault  Rifles, 10,000 hand grenades and over 200 anti-tank weapons with millions of rounds of ammunition. These armaments have been enlarged by the United States, Czech Republic, Albania, and Italy.

Bolstered by Western support, the Kurdish guerrilla, to some extent, contained and pushed back IS. However, the simplified stories of the heroism of Kurdish fighters holding out against the faceless evil of IS have distorted the reality of the conflict. Kurdish advances have been accompanied by a wave of forced displacement and home demolitions of Sunni Arabs in northern Iraq by ethnic-nationalists, separatist movements and militant groups.

The narrative of terrorism, the grotesque snuff videos produced by IS and the violent nature of its insurgency combined with the West's fascination with the organisation's ferocity has significantly contributed to Western politicians overlooking the military conduct and alleged war crimes of Kurdish militant groups such as the PKK.

Turkey's repeated aerial bombardment of Kurdish positions in northern Iraq have illustrated Erdogan's intentions to fold Kurdish advances and its national project while internal conflicts between the Iraqi government's loose alliance have emerged as Shiite militias have been in intermittent conflict with peshmerga forces, as illustrated recently by a firefight in Tuz Khormatu in late April.

The disunity amongst the local coalition fighting IS will only strengthen the latter's resolve while the American re-intervention in Iraqi affairs through a covert counterterrorism strategy against IS, by channelling equipment, weapons and intelligence into the peshmerga, militias, sects and tribes opposed to IS means the Obama administration's current strategy reinforces the cycle of violence in Iraq. This will pave the way for future sectarian, ethnic-nationalist, and tribal conflict. The question of Kurdistan is far from complete and its war with Turkey and local Iraqi factions vying for power will feature heavily in the future of Iraqi state.

Political gridlock in Baghdad has only aggravated the situation. The dramatic storming of the Iraqi parliament and Baghdad's Green Zone by Muqtada al-Sadr's supporters in April after his denunciation of the political class for failing to reform the political quota system plagued by deep-seated corruption demonstrates that Iraq has a long way to go before it achieves a semblance of stability.

The non-violent mini-revolution (30 April) which occurred is significant. It shows that Western policymakers and media have largely viewed the Iraqi Civil War through the lens of the war on terror and sectarian violence. The disproportionate focus of the Obama administration on IS's operations and the prioritisation of pursuing the terrorist group has not addressed the roots of Iraq's violence, nor has it effectively solved political divisions in Baghdad. 

In the current atmosphere of bottom-up politics created by the Arab revolutions and counter-revolutions (2010 - current), the state is experiencing a series of revolutionary convulsions which have been occurring since the U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The storming of the Iraqi Parliament, the declaration of a state emergency, the departure of numerous Iraqi politicians and their families, and the largely non-violent nature of the protests which have culminated in the occupation of Green Zone demonstrate that the Iraqi conflict cuts deeper than the sectarian and terrorist narratives spoon-fed to us by politicians and mainstream media. 

As Martin Chulov wrote in February, "Across all levels of society, a realisation is sinking in that Iraq is now entering a phase that could prove every bit as destabilising - perhaps even more so - than the war against IS." IS fight through a vicious sectarian narrative of war slaughtering Shiites, Yazidis, Kurds and Christians indiscriminately in the hope of provoking the groups into conducting pogroms against Sunni civilians.

Such acts reinforce the perception amongst numerous Sunni tribes and communities that seceding from the central government, joining IS and forming alternative forms of political control will suit their interests. 

However political grievances are not the only force in Iraqi society driving conflict. Iraq is in the midst of socio-economic collapse. The inefficiency of state and grass-roots political economy moulded by instability and which has existed since the Iran-Iraq war (1980 - 1988) has created a black-market meritocracy and an oil-dependent economy.

The latter, according to the finance minister Hoshyar Zebari, accounts for 93-95% of all revenues.  This system has flourished as well as Iraq's dependence on oil to hold up its economy and the collapse of oil prices in 2015 have only added to the woes of Iraq's socio-economic predicament where there is no democracy, power shortages, and dire water shortages. 

Corruption, a major source of frustration amongst Iraqi civilians, has been a catalyst for major protests across Iraq since 2013. The deterioration of the ISF since 2014 illustrates how rampant it has become. The United States spent over $20 billion on the Iraqi Security Forces from the 2003 invasion until U.S troops withdrew at the end of 2011.

However, the seizure of Mosul was a military catastrophe for the ISF and as General Babakir Zebari conceded, the issue of ghost soldiers lay at the heart of the matter. According to Zebari ', 30,000 ghost soldiers existed in Iraq's military and...corrupt officers were pocketing their salaries. The fall of Mosul in 2014 was in part blamed on there being far fewer soldiers in position to defend the city than there were on the books.' A senior Iraqi officer went into further detail:  

“The first kind: each officer is allowed, for example, five guards. He’ll keep two, send three home and pocket their salary or an agreed percentage. Then the second and bigger group is at the brigade level. A brigade commander usually has 30, 40 or more soldiers who stay at home or don’t exist. The problem is that he too, to keep his job as a brigade commander, has to bribe his own hierarchical superiors with huge amounts of money.” 

With an army buckling under corruption and unable to fight effectively, billions of dollars which were meant to invest in infrastructure, fighting terror groups, and economic projects being funnelled into political patronage and the political elite of SCIRI and the Islamic Dawa Party, it is unsurprising that Iraq has been conditioned for revolutionary upheaval and instability.

The ascension of al-Sadr and his call for reforms have boosted his popularity, while his charismatic persona has drawn hundreds of thousands, if not millions to his cause. Despite al-Sadr bearing a heavy responsibility for facilitating pogroms against Sunni civilians during the Iraq War (2003 - 2011) with the Mahdi militia and death squads, he has since 'reinvented himself as a reform champion.'

Despite al-Sadr's popularity, the occupation of the Green Zone has demonstrated that the divisions in Shiite politics have not disappeared. This class-struggle has existed since the 1990s where underclass Sadrist militants who belonged to a generation deeply fashioned by American sanctions in 1990s, its subsequent occupation and the socio-economic destruction of Iraq have been in confrontation with conservative, formerly exiled Islamist parties and urbanised elites. The splits which exist between the various Shiite militias propping up the ISF and the regime will stall military operations and cohesion against IS.

However, this is not to say IS does not have its own problems. The label of a 'Sunni' insurgency championed by IS is deceptive. The insurgency against the American occupation and the Shiite-dominated government is ideologically split between secular Ba'athist loyalists of the former regime, nationalist Islamists, Iraqi Salafists, specific Sunni tribal groups (not all), and jihadists groups such as IS. Each group will, like the Shiites, have specific local, regional and political agendas which are likely to cause political infighting and violent conflict.

As Hugh Roberts argues 'while (IS) is confronting the new Shiite regime in Baghdad' as did 'Jabhat al-Nusra and others in Syria. Such jihadis rarely if ever have a notion of how to replace the state they are fighting' and usually turn on each other, as exemplified by intra-jihadist violence in Afghanistan, Yemen,  and Syria. A weakened IS will make it easier to defeat, however, the long-term prospect of containing and managing a jihadist civil war paints a potentially grim picture for central government security prospects. 

The sheer variety and diversity of political actors operating make partition preferable for some policymakers. The brutality of the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars have left outsiders sceptical that the notion of power-sharing between various rivals can be achieved. Partition is a short-term solution which will ease violence and contain the conflicts.  However, it will produce immense implications for the geopolitical balance of the region.

The current Arab revolutions and authoritarian counter-revolution across the Middle East such as Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Libya, divided between secularists, Arab nationalists, Ba'athists, Islamists, Kurds and jihadists violently contesting the future of their countries are not united. Iraq, as both the intra-Shiite class conflict, the Kurds de-facto establishment of a mini-state and the fragmented nature of the 'Sunni' insurgency illustrate that the state has had similar divisions over the nation's course since 2003.

The collision of emerging grass-roots revolutionary narratives and violence in Iraqi politics, a legacy of draconian authoritarianism under Saddam and catalysed by U.S military confrontation, occupation and sanctions, with that of the top-down radical enterprise which encompassed the Bush Doctrine offer a new paradigm through which to view violence in Iraq. American policymakers, by removing Saddam, inadvertently acted as the mechanism which enabled a revolution in Iraqi politics.

This had been developing in the 1990s and early 2000s as a prototype of, and bearing similar features to, the current upheaval and violence across the Arab Middle East.  Part of this revolution occurred under occupation and bears its own unique features including timing (2003 as supposed to 2010), the role of U.S policymakers in post-Saddam Iraq and the nature of the Iraqi insurgents. The consequences of the Iraq war are still being felt and the potential dismantlement/weakening of the puppet regime in Baghdad in recent days and the ascension of a Shiite civil conflict represents another phase in Iraq's revolution and how it will be defined as a future nation. 

In such an atmosphere, IS will flourish and exploit the political chaos and divisions between the various factions contesting power in the fractured state. If it is defeated as a state, IS will respond by reverting to what it was before when it was led by Zarqawi as Al-Qa'ida in Iraq; an insurgency and a terror group still capable of horrifying violence.

In this form, it will be around for years with covert outside support from powerful private donors, supported by its bases in Syria, fuelled by the long-standing war economy in Iraq and the trickle of foreign fighters from North Africa and Europe, and will most certainly continue to have the capacity to shape regional and local geopolitics. Territorial caliphate or not, IS will remain a major factor in Iraq's political conflict and Iraq's Arab Spring. 

Peace or no peace, the Syrian conflict will not end for years

Photo by aladdin hammami on Unsplash

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The Geneva talks, ongoing since February 2016, have created cautious optimism that five years of bloodshed which has fractured Syria will come to a close and pave the way for peace in the wider region. However, these hopes have come under enormous pressure since the coalition of Syrian jihadists and rebels launched a new offensive against the Syrian Armed Forces. These renewed attacks spanning north-western Syria and inside Latika and Hama comes as a response to the army's continued bombardment and attacks on rebel positions.

The underlying hostilities between rebel factions and government since the establishment of a ceasefire and the animosity between jihadist cells and warlords across vast swathes of the north paint a grim picture for post-conflict Syria. Numerous actors have a vested interest in prolonging the overlapping conflicts and war economy which has developed.  As Nicholas Barker writes for Strife 'civil wars elevate 'specialists in violence' to positions of political authority, militarising local governance, and many studies have explored how these violent entrepreneurs are generally unwilling to relinquish wartime gains in power and status once the fighting has stopped.'

Sectarian violence perpetrated by state-sponsored Alawite militias, ethnic cleansing by ethno-nationalist Kurdish groups, and the horrors of ISIS acting in conjunction with Assad's bloody military operations has irrevocably changed Syria's political landscape. Such brutality complicates disarmament, building trust between different parties, and reconciliation and even then realising such peace-building initiatives is decades away. 

Western policymakers will not repeat the mistake of dismantling Syria's political and military infrastructure, as Paul Bremer did in 2003 with the Baathist party in Iraq, and Moscow has clearly stated that the current Syrian government holds power in Damascus.  These factors will matter little in Western geopolitical calculations.

While the removal of Assad and creating a pro-Western Syria is no longer an option, a Syria wracked by instability, barely held up by Iran and Russia, and where the government does not have a monopoly on the violence or territory will suit U.S policymakers as supposed to a strong Syria which threatens its allies and interests. There is no need to prove malign intent on the part of the Western powers and the consequences of such destabilisation far outweigh the geopolitical gains which have weakened key allies Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, produced a crippling refugee crisis and left scores of civilians dead across Europe in a wave of terrorist attacks. 

The current violence will have ramifications which will go beyond the 'official' closure of the Syrian war. Syria remains a state, however as Lakhdar Brahimi noted in Der Spiegel ‘there are fears Syria would become another Somalia...a collapsed state with warlords all over the place.’

A settlement in Geneva will do little for the fractured country and the Syrian government will remain in perpetual war with the assortment of rebels dotted across the country. Terrorist organisations such as Jahbat al-Nusra remain a powerful foe and will have little interest in relinquishing the power they have accumulated in the rebels coalition, nor will ISIS's leaders be considered a faction which diplomats can realistically negotiate with unless they tackle its support base (for example addressing Sunni grievances in Syria and Iraq). 

The new political space has opened up a political vacuum for sectarian and tribal discourse, criminality and terrorism and a flourishing war economy.  Equally, despite being under bombardment by an array of international actors, Raqqa and ISIS's surrounding territory in north-western Syria still awaits a ground-assault which will take months to prepare and execute in coordination with attempts to recapture Mosul in Iraq.

In the aftermath of the destruction of ISIS's 'caliphate,' it is almost certain there will be scrambling as different actors claim territory and prestige and prepare for the next wave of violence which will hit the region.

The subsequent counterinsurgency campaign to uproot ISIS and jihadist groups when the groups revert to classic asymmetrical and urban warfare will be prolonged and bloody in both Syria and Iraq as exemplified by the concentrated suicide bombings around Baghdad which have occurred since ISIS lost territory in Tikrit, Ramadi and Sinjar. As with the Obama administration's 'official' departure from Iraq where the Iraq war (2003 - 2011) never really ended, Syria's conflict will roll on.  

A violent counterinsurgency campaign by Assad's ground forces against jihadists spearheaded by U.S and British drone attacks and sustained aerial attacks by Russian aircraft will do little to encourage the Syrian refugees flooding Jordan, Lebanon and Europe to return to Syria. The refugee crisis is swiftly becoming tied to Syria's long-term problems which European and Middle Eastern states will have to face. 

Defeating extremist groups such as ISIS and Al-Qa'ida in Syria, establishing a negotiated settlement and removing Assad who is loathed by the opposition and wider international community will not end the war.  

Renewed civil war will occur even with his departure and even if Syria's political institutions are conserved as actors, old and new, fight for the spoils of war and manoeuvre into positions of power that suit their interests and their capacity to influence Syria's future. 

This horrific cycle is, naturally, the most inefficient means of pursuing peace across the region. However, for the most powerful actors in Syria today, including Assad, Al-Qa'ida, militant Kurdish groups and ISIS, violence is the best option for cementing their short-term and long-term interests.

Syria has fast become a new Afghanistan, a state prone to bouts of serious internal violence, low-intensity tribal, ethnic and sectarian warfare and a country that has become a transnational haven for regional and global terrorist organisations. It follows the path of Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan where a vast array of actors with different ideological and territorial agendas define the political and territorial landscape rather than single, conventional state authority.

Such a future offers scant regard for human rights and a democratic transition, such an environment means open-ended war and a fragmented, divided nation, and such a state offers nothing but a bleak future for the Syrian people. 

Winning Hearts And Minds: The rise of al-Qa'ida in Yemen

Syria, Iraq and Libya have become significant strongholds of ISIS, Al-Qa'ida and Jabhat al-Nusra, however the strength of the branch of Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has expanded considerably in the chaos brought about by civil war in Yemen. This rise to prominence has been catalysed by covert U.S and British military actions which have significantly contributed to stoking violence in the region and their support for the Saudi-led coalition intervening in the Yemen civil war since March 2015. Paralleling these actions, the strategy of AQAP, while violent, has gained support from local populations and has allowed the jihadist division to establish an emirate in Yemen. 

The costs of the conflict in Yemen are staggering. 83% of Yemen's population require aid, 14.4 million require food as the country totters on the brinks of famine, 2.4 million civilians have become refugees and 6,200 people have been killed and thousands more wounded since the outbreak of war in 2015.  Saudi Arabia have been accused by  Amnesty International of committing war crimes against civilians through the sustained use of cluster munitions and lethal explosive weapons banned under international law in high-density population centres. As Saudi Arabia's war continues, developments have allowed AQAP to quietly establish an emirate led by Emir Qasim al-Raymi while the continuing violence has allowed ISIS-affiliates to become a political player in Yemen. 

The emergence of ISIS in Sana'a, Shabarah, al-Bayda and Hadramawt as a potentially powerful faction in the conflict and rival to the doctrine of AQAP paints a grim picture for the future of Yemen. The sub-faction, led by Abu Bilal al-Harbi who pledged allegiance to Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi in November 2014, has sought to exploit Yemen's instability since the revolution of 2011. The competing neo-Salafist and neo-Wahhabist ideologies, methodologies, and tactics, as it did in Syria and Iraq, will deteriorate into a intra-jihadist conflicts as the competing terrorist cells seek to carve out mini-statelets in the disorder produced by the war.

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““Turning a blind-eye to Saudi officials covert support for Al-Qa’ida’s establishment of a substate and fanning the flames of jihadist civil war will damage European and Saudi security prospects.””

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The escalation of the Yemen civil war presented the small but lethal sub-faction with an opportunity. ISIS's injection of ultra-violent sectarian warfare into Yemen and indiscriminate targeting of Muslim civilians threatens to destabilise AQAP's agenda to create an emirate in the collapsed state. This conflict between AQAP and ISIS was kick-started by the latter's bombing of two mosques in Sana'a  (20 March, 2015) which killed 142 Yemeni civilians and followed by a triple suicide bombing in Aden (25 March, 2016) which killed 26.  While the umbrella organisation of AQAP holds more territory and military strength than their rivals in Yemen, ISIS's spectacular violence remains complimented by its ideological momentum which has gained greater influence and attraction as a brand to extremists than AQAP since ISIS establishment of a caliphate in 2014. 

However, AQAP remains as deadly a threat as ISIS to regional and international actors. The January 2015 Île-de-France attacks which killed 17 civilians were directly connected to AQAP's operations in Yemen. Saïd Kouachi (pictured right), one of the assailants who massacred employees at Charlie Hebdo magazine visited Yemen between 2009 and 2010 before spending several months in 2011 training with AQAP.  While ISIS have carried out significant attacks in Paris and Brussels which combined have killed 162 people, it cannot be forgotten that Al-Qai'da perpetrated equally lethal attacks in Madrid, London, and New York while several major plots by the organisation (including the October plane bomb plot in 2010) have been foiled by intelligence services. The rise of AQAP in Yemen and the success of the first wave of Paris attacks illustrates that Al-Qa'ida's brand of violence remains a force to be reckoned with.

Despite AQAP's violence against Western governments (what they describe as the far enemy) the organisation is not simply exploiting Yemen's instability. AQAP is being supported by members of Saudi Arabia's coalition and private donors. According to 'a BBC documentary crew...they filmed jihadists and pro-government militia men fighting rebels near the the southern city of Taiz, supported by UAE soldiers.' 

This support, direct and indirect, in conjunction to Yemen's collapse has allowed AQAP to strike significant financial gains equivalent to those ISIS had when they seized Mosul in 2014 and Sirte in 2015. According to Reuters 'AQAP looted Mukalla’s central bank branch, netting an estimated $100 million, according to two senior Yemeni security officials.“That represents their biggest financial gain to date,” one of the officials said. “That’s enough to fund them at the level they had been operating for at least another 10 years."' It is estimated that AQAP's seizure of Yemen's economic centres along the coastline in the form of Mukalla, Shaqra, Zinjibar, Jaar and Ash Shihr is producing an estimated at $2 - $5 million in revenue per day through oil smuggling, taxes and tariffs on shipping. 

However the Saudi Arabia-led coalition's covert support for the emergence of AQAP suits its short-term geo-political and ideological objectives despite the cell's long-standing opposition to the al-Saud monarchy. A Yemen destabilised by areas controlled by jihadists and terrorist groups, calculated by the Saudis as being a containable threat, is preferable to a stable Yemen state led by President Hadi, the Shiite Houthis which is influenced by Iran. 

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““83% of Yemen’s population require aid, 14.4 million require food, 2.4 million civilians have become refugees and 6,200 have been killed.””

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However the drop in oil prices, Saudi Arabia's fiscal deficit, overextension in proxy wars in Syria and Iraq, the country's inability to detach from its self created quagmire in Yemen, and an increase in attacks by AQAP and ISIS in Saudi Arabia question whether such a strategy will be successful in the long-term. As summarised by Patrick Cockburn:

"The Saudis have overplayed their hand, backing local allies and proxies in Syria and Yemen who are never going to win decisive victories. The fall in oil prices leading to an austerity budget has increased the incentive to beat the patriotic and religious drum in order to promote national solidarity in face of growing challenges."

Why have Saudi actions and its support for AQAP not gained traction across the international community? Saudi Arabia's officials claim that one of the core objectives of its campaign is to deny terrorists a safe haven in Yemen. This campaign has been endorsed by U.S and British policymakers and sold to the public as part of the package of the 'Global War on Terror' against ISIS. This endorsement has produced profit for the British arms trade as shown by Labour MP Diane Abbott: 'Since 1 March 2015, we have granted over 100 requests for military equipment, suspending only a handful. In the first three months of the war alone, UK business made £1.7 billion in turnover by selling arms to the House of Saud.' The consequences of nourishing this cycle of decentralised sectarian, terrorist and tribal violence have strengthened AQAP.  

AQAP have presented themselves as providers of stability and security by channelling profits made from their war economy into the communities they govern in Yemen and 'shielding' communities from the horrors of the Yemen civil war, the use of U.S cluster bombs by Saudi Arabia and the grotesque violence of ISIS. ISIS's sub-faction in Yemen and AQAP are already in direct conflict as Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS are in Syria. AQAP's strategy of limiting attacks to military and government have built support amongst many Yemeni tribes while the group deters its local Yemeni supporters from joining ISIS by presenting the graphic violence of the group across the Middle East in propaganda videos and denouncing and distancing itself from ISIS's violence against Yemeni communities.

AQAP subjugate the population to sharia law but do not brutalise the wider population as ISIS initially does and provide security for civilians displaced and afraid by the uncertainty of war. According to Reuters, a 47-year old resident claimed that "I prefer that al-Qai'da stay here, not Mukalla to be liberated, the situation is stable, more than any 'free' part of Yemen. The alternative to al-Qai'da is much worse." Another resident said her life had changed little since AQAP seize the city stating "We carry out our normal lives, they walk among the people...of course they want to build a safe haven." 

AQAP is building trust and strengthening relationships with its local populations and communities. In the long-term, this is more difficult to uproot. Secure, happy populations who feel AQAP provide essential needs including clean water, food, electricity, economy and security will be less inclined to turn against them. Such needs, already scarce in the Middle East's poorest country, are now completely absent with the destruction of large chunks of Yemen's economic and state infrastructure. These economic factors only enhance AQAP's stature. 

ISIS and their foreign fighters, despite providing similar needs to appeal to local populations in Raqqa and Mosul,  glorify in the slaughter of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, indiscriminately conduct suicide attacks against mosques and impose themselves through fear and ultra-violence. These actions have alienated many local communities from their campaign thus far. 

Alongside these developments, U.S and British policymakers and its Gulf State allies have become complicit in strengthening AQAP grip on Yemen's coastline.  The successes of AQAP establishing an emirate in Yemen demonstrate the failure of President Obama's 'Yemen model' and 14 years of drone strikes in Yemen and the consequences of U.S and British policymakers support for Saudi Arabia's brutal policies in Yemen.

 While drone strikes have been effective in eliminating several high-profile figures of AQAP, including founder Nasir al-Wuhayshi, they have allowed Al-Qa'ida's message to proliferate across Yemen and open up space for them to conduct their military campaigns against domestic Yemeni opposition groups and sell their war against Western states to local populations. This is illustrated by an Arab Barometer survey carried out in 2007 which found that 73.5 per cent of Yemenis believed that U.S involvement in the region justified attacks on U.S citizens everywhere. This was before the expansion of the drone wars by the Obama administration, Saudi Arabia's intervention in Yemen and British military support for Saudi Arabia's military in Yemen. 

The collateral damage of drone strikes (which have killed hundreds of civilians) and supporting Saudi Arabia has made the United States and the United Kingdom enemies in Yemen. The cost to Yemen's population as the U.S and British policymakers pursue national security solidified the perception amongst many that the authorities in Yemen could not provide protection to their own civilians and that they have been coerced into supporting Washington's drone campaign. The drone wars of the Obama administration multiplied anti-American narratives and gave AQAP propaganda and recruiting tools. These tools were enhanced by military-support from British and U.S for Saudi Arabia's aerial, land and naval blockade which have ravaged Yemen and produced grave instability.

Where little support for jihadist groups such AQAP and neutrality towards the West's 'Global War on Terror' originally existed, it has been replaced by hostility, bitterness and anger towards Western policymakers and its regional allies. These international actors have endorsed, funded or directly taken part in the slaughter of civilians and frequently violated the state's sovereignty while the international community remains silent in the face of Saudi atrocities. The outbreak of civil war has only exacerbated Yemen's suffering and boosted AQAP's appeal while resentment against the United Kingdom and the U.S has increased. 

Equally Western policymakers, Yemeni politicians, and Saudi Arabia have demonstrated, from many Yemeni civilians perspectives, that their welfare and security is low on their political agendas. Western policymakers have not only failed at a practical military level in eliminating terrorist groups across Yemen, they have failed at an ideological level in combating AQAP's doctrine.

AQAP's establishment of an emirate in Yemen has been aided by the civil war's relative lack of media coverage by comparison to the wars in Syria, Iraq and Libya and the conflict with ISIS. The international community's desensitisation to the people of Yemen's plight is due in part to their limited role in catalysing the refugee crisis in Europe and Yemen's geographical isolation from major events. Similarly, broad European and American audiences are largely unaware of the role of U.S and British policymakers have played in contributing to what has been described by the U.N described as the world's foremost "forgotten crisis" and humanitarian catastrophe. 

All these factors, short-term and long-term,  make it is easier for AQAP to sell its anti-Western narrative to its pool of recruits, sustain itself as a movement and launch attacks against regional and international targets. The consequences of a year of war and a decade of misguided Western policies in Yemen will be far-reaching at a local, regional and international level. The truce, recently announced 11 April 2016, will do little to alter the fragmentation of Yemen, reverse the sweeping change occurring across Yemen's political landscape, and deter AQAP and ISIS from pursuing and consolidating their objectives. 

Ignoring the Conservative government and the Obama administration's support for alleged war crimes of Saudi Arabia in Yemen, turning a blind-eye Saudi officials covert support for AQAP's establishment of a sub-state, and fanning the flames of a jihadist civil war will damage European and Saudi Arabia security prospects. This damage produced by both deliberate and miscalculated policies will be eventually realised by future atrocities against American, Saudi and European civilians and such attacks perpetrated by AQAP will echo the famous Yemeni proverb: "What you sow, so shall you reap." 

Persecuted, Detained, Tortured, Smuggled: The Eritrean refugee crisis

Photo by mulugeta wolde on Unsplash

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According to UNHCR, 444,091 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers have fled the country as the state, ruled by Isaias Afwerki since 1993, continues to conduct human rights violations, crimes against humanity, and persecute his people with relative impunity. The international community has remained largely desensitised to the plight of Eritreans (and an array of various other nationalities) within Eritrea and those fleeing across North Africa to the Middle East and Europe. 

The current Eritrean government headed by Isaias Afwerki, described by the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea as a totalitarian state, has created a draconian system of oppression which is responsible for widespread commitment of widespread gross human rights violations. These alleged violations have included; 'extrajudicial killings; enforced disappearances; arbitrary arrest and detention; torture and inhumane prison conditions; violations of freedom of expression and opinion; freedom of association and assembly; freedom of religion and belief; freedom of movement; and forced military conscription.' These human rights violations committed by Eritrean authorities have been without accountability. Described by many as the North Korea of Africa, the regime's brutality has forced hundreds of thousands of Eritreans to flee the country to states across North Africa and the Middle East including Libya, Sudan, Egypt and Israel. 

The mass exodus from Eritrea has produced grave threats to the thousands of individuals and families, threats of which are diverse as they are deadly. The initial threat to those fleeing begins with border crossing where refugees are often intercepted and/or shot by border guards in Eritrea, Egypt and Sudan. 

The threat of dehydration and exposure to the harsh Saharan elements frequently means the refugees are dependent on Bedouin smugglers transporting them across North Africa. However, within these smuggling networks, numerous refugees have been raped, tortured, abducted and ransomed by traffickers and smugglers, as well as systematically exploited by their transporters. Many have died on these horrific journeys due to harsh weather conditions, abuse, and are frequently killed based upon their ethnicity and religious identity. 

Terrorist and insurgent groups operating in Egypt's Sinai peninsula and bases in Libya, including the ultra-violent Islamic State group, have kidnapped and killed hundreds of Eritrean, Sudanese and Ethiopian refugees and asylum seekers in 2015 alone. The terrorist organisations, who frequently coordinate with human traffickers and smugglers, use the refugees as a commodity to fund their various causes and military activities. The Islamic State group have also beheaded Eritrean and Ethiopian Christians,  forced men and women to convert to their violent jihadist doctrine, and enslaved men, women and children.

In Sub-Saharan countries such as Libya, the plight facing the Eritrean refugees who manage to survive after months of toil has only deepened. Libya is split by a vicious civil war and refugees have swiftly become abstracts and instruments of policy to be used as political and economic bargaining chips for smuggler and militia groups alike. Refugees arriving in Libya are largely unprotected by Libyan authorities from terrorist and militia groups, smugglers and criminal gangs. 

Militias such as the Nawasi Brigade have exploited the refugees’ plight for economic and political leverage in the battle for Libya's future. This war economy, fuelled by forced labour, exploitation, trafficking and smuggling networks, has thrived in the environment produced by the civil war. An equally troubling fact is that many of the militias and smugglers perpetrating these abuses are directly funded and contracted by National Salvation Government because of the authorities' inability to provide for the refugees pouring into the country.

The exhausted refugees and asylum seekers placed within militia-run detention compounds face the threat of starvation, malnutrition, dehydration, disease, separation from family and loved ones, exposure due to inadequate provision of clothing, arrest, imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, and death as accountability has significantly decreased with the disintegration of the Libyan state. 

Concurrent to this, refugees live in desperate living conditions and face mistreatment by security personnel within the detention compounds such as Tarik as-Sikka. Numerous witnesses have reported that authorities and guards have separated families, raped women, withheld food and water, chained people, and beaten men, women and children. Those who attempt to escape from these various compounds and detention centres are usually killed or tortured. 

The plight of the Eritrean refugees and the horrors they face fleeing across North Africa must be addressed by the international community, nor can the human rights violations committed by various states, government authorities, militia groups and individuals remain unaccountable. It is the responsibility of Libyan authorities and other states to provide sanctuary to and respect the human rights of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants seeking sanctuary, the vast majority of whom have been forced to flee their home country due to political, religious and sexual persecution, dictatorships, civil war, deadly familial or community violence.

Machiavellian Statecraft: Vladimir Putin's Syrian Gambit and the Fallacy of Western Policy

Photo by Don Fontijn on Unsplash

The withdrawal of the majority of Russian forces from Syria has caught the international community by surprise. By withdrawing the majority of Russian forces and waging a limited war across Syria, Vladamir Putin has succeeded in preventing the Kremlin from being drawn into a destabilising quagmire which would drain Russian financial and military resources and man-power.

The Middle East is the graveyard of superpowers and extended military adventures, occupation and attempts to alter regimes have produced catastrophes for regional and global powers in across the 20th and 21st century including Israel in Lebanon, the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. 

Since 2011, the Middle East has shifted from revolution to a series of civil wars which have escalated into deadly proxy wars hastening the return of unpredictable great power politics. Western policy, covert and overt, in the Middle East has produced instability, fuelled decentralised sectarian and tribal conflict, exacerbated violence and contributed to a destabilising refugee crisis. The Libyan state lies shattered, in Iraq, there were zero suicide attacks in the country's history until the U.S led-invasion of 2003 (Since then, there have been 1,892) while half a million in Syria lie dead as NATO, through regional allies, covertly tried to depose of the House of Assad. Public opinion across the United States and the majority of European countries is divided and largely shudders at getting sucked into another direct military intervention in the Middle East.

At a regional level, the results of intervening in the Syrian Civil War have backfired dramatically on regional allies, most notably Saudi Arabia and Turkey both of whom have fanned the flames of sectarian conflict in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. This has nurtured ultra-violent jihadist groups across the region including ISIS who have targeted the populations of both countries in a string of major attacks since 2014. 

The string of catastrophes produced by Western policymakers have been exploited and worsened by the Kremlin and Bashar al-Assad. Russian and Syrian bombings in northern Syria have increased the flow of refugees crossing into Turkey and Eastern Europe as concentrated Russian airstrikes and logistical support appear to have finally broken the deadly five-year stalemate decisively in the favour of Assad's ground forces. Since 2013, the escalating conflict has created the conditions in which ISIS, Jahbat al-Nusra and extremist terrorist cells could emerge as major factions shaping the Syrian conflict. For the first time since the onset of civil war, the direct intervention of the Russian-led coalition including Iran, and Hezbollah to bolster the Syrian government's position has produced tangible results which could hasten the war's end and the fall of ISIS.  

Strategically it is a successful military and diplomatic coup by Putin. Domestically he will strengthen his popularity within Russia (sixty per cent of Russians supported airstrikes in Syria) and after a controversial campaign in Ukraine which led to damaging sanctions being placed on the Russian economy, he has"forced the West to deal with Russia again." 

Despite this, there is no guarantee the Geneva talks will create a sustainable peace agreement nor will it end the suffering of the Syrian people; vast swathes of territory still remain under the control of ISIS and uncompromising extremist elements, the Syrian government, while still standing, controls a state in ruins, is despised and has been considerably weakened by years of war. 

However, the Syrian people's plight will be of little concern in Putin's calculations. As Mark Leonard writes advancing personal, national and international objectives remain his priority: "If the west falls into the trap and goes to war alongside Putin and Assad against not just ISIS but all Islamist opposition groups, it will be the ultimate funeral pyre for the aspirations of the Arab Spring. Western idealism will be presented to the world as the empty hypocrisy that Putin always thought it was."

These predictions have become a reality in recent weeks and months. The savage attacks in Paris in January and November 2015 and the murder of 217 civilians (212 of whom were Russian) abroad a Russian airline over the Sinai played into Putin's hands. The increase of major ISIS-sponsored attacks across the Middle East and Europe gave the Western powers and Russia a common enemy and common ground to operate and cooperate on even it meant being at the expense of the historic Arab revolutions. In Moscow, the presentation of ISIS as a direct threat to Russia's national security acted as a catalyst for the Russian military to decisively shape the conflict in their favour by consolidating Assad's government and eliminating and/or critically weakening all rebel strongholds in northern Syria. 

The statement from the Russians is clear; counter-revolution and authoritarianism is preferable to people power, revolution and the potential power vacuum it leaves behind in Middle Eastern politics. The potential consequences of Assad being removed from power, the potential dismantlement of Syria's basic political infrastructure and replaced by an opposition-dominated by jihadi groups and their hyper-aggressive ideology is an unacceptable option to Hezbollah, Iran, and the elements of the Syrian population which continues to support Assad, including non-Islamist Sunnis, Alawites, Christians and Druze. 

The attacks across Europe by Al-Qaeda and ISIS, both of which have long operated within the military branch of the Syrian opposition, and the refugee crisis in Europe have finally convinced Western policymakers that the replacing Assad's regime with a pro-Western puppet is fantastical. Even then the funnelling of weapons, manpower and finances into radical jihadist groups by the Gulf States, the Turkish authorities reluctance (to Barack Obama's fury) to close the border which the majority of foreign fighters crossed to reach the war-zone and the determination to undermine Syria in the proxy war against Iran had all-but destroyed these expectations years ago. The odds of establishing a democracy, if not slim, were destroyed by the Assad regime in 2011. 

The United States, nonetheless, has succeeded in accomplishing its secondary objective established in 2006 (according to Wikileaks); destabilising the Syria government and what is considered to be a sponsor of terrorism. According to Filiu, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) was 'one of the main partners of Assad's regime (and) was the main entry point' into Iraq for foreign jihadists from 2003 onwards to undermine the U.S occupation. However destabilising Syria has produced dire consequences for the United States' own regional allies, Europe and the wider region while strengthening Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf. 

The United States' stuttering and contradictory Syrian policy and the attacks in Europe have convinced European leaders such as Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel to seek closer cooperation and more assertive action with the Kremlin in tackling ISIS and solving the Syrian Civil War. This closer alignment with European security interests is allowing Putin to "execute his war on revolutions both on a practical level and as a battle of ideas." The Middle East matters to European states, particularly concerns for national security and Putin has successfully exploited the fears of European citizens and politicians alike provoked by hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving on its doorstep. 

The migrant/refugee crisis has catalysed the rise of populist, anti-migrant, Islamaphobic groups and right-wing parties wrapping repugnant and often racist policies in the rhetoric of security across Europe. Suffering from the crisis, the increasing issue of separatism, dangerously polarised politically, and enduring economic stagnation, the EU has become vulnerable. This weakness has, to some extent, been deepened by Putin. As Alaister Sloane argues, Russian actions over Syria (which have killed 2,000 civilians) have contributed to Europe's instability by stoking a fresh refugee exodus in northern Syria. The uprooting of 40,000 - 70,000 refugees from Aleppo threatens to destabilise and divide European countries further, and more importantly from a geo-strategic perspective, Turkey which remains has descended into an increasingly volatile civil conflict and authoritarian tendencies. 

The scale-down of the Russian presence in Syria indicates that Assad, for now, is here to stay. Following the deposition of autocrats Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi and the collapse of Iraq and Libya into violent civil wars, Western leaders have been forced to accept the continuation of Assad's brutal regime after trying and failing to force him from power. While American influence and the work of John Kerry remains pivotal in resolving the civil war, European leaders recognise that what happens in the Middle East affects Europe's stability more directly than it will impact the United States as the Obama administration has sought, unsuccessfully, to disengage from the region. This hesitancy in Washington stands in stark contrast to the decisiveness shown by Putin's inner circle in dealing with the Syrian war and the consequences of American mismanagement of its geopolitical strategy. 

The failure of American and European policymakers and the success of Putin is a bitter pill to swallow for the West.  At home, Putin's successes present him as the key peacemaker in the Syrian civil war and consolidate his plutocratic regime, regionally it increases Russian credibility and weakens Western allies, and internationally it damages the credibility of the United States and divides Europe. It has also, at least in the short-term, curbed Russia's regional security problems in the unstable provinces of Chechnya and Dagestan. It is believed that the Russian authorities have channelled 2,000 extremists into Syria and Iraq to join the so-called Islamic State. 

The Russian operations in Syria stand in contrast to the mistakes made in Ukraine where the Russian military's wages a covert war alongside Ukrainian-Russian separatists which has killed 8,000 people and displaced 2.4 million more. Russian efforts to destabilise the country stoked Ukrainian nationalism, invited crippling economic sanctions and the annexation of Crimea, while audacious, combined with the downing of a Malaysian Airlines MH17 civilian jet by a Russian-made Buk missile fired by Russian-supported insurgents severely tarnished Putin's international reputation. 

Putin's Syrian gambit has not been without major risks. The diplomatic confrontation between NATO and Russia following the shooting down of a Sukhoi Su-24m bomber deemed to have violated Turkish airspace illustrated the risks of potential miscalculations turning a regional affair into a direct global conflict. 

Similarly, while the Kremlin has accomplished its short-term geopolitical objectives there is a debate that intervention will place the Russians, military and civilian, in the sights of global and regional jihadist groups. As argued by Shiraz Maher, 'Russian involvement in Syria has strengthened the idea that those who join jihadist groups "are defending the entire umma (world Islamic community). Not only are the Russians "ultra-crusaders" fighting with the blessing of the Orthodox Church, they are also allying with' neo-Wahhabists and neo-Salafists arch-enemy; Shiite Iran, whom many radicals consider to be a heretical entity. 

As The Economist emphasised in July 2015 'while the chances of ISIS recruits from Dagestan and Chechyna returning are slim,' government lawlessness combined with inadequate de-radicalisation programs for young men who manage to slip past Russia's tightly governed borders present a major future problem to Russian security in the Caucasian province. This problem has taken on an increased severity in 2015 after the North Caucasus insurgency (Wilayat al-Qawqaz) a major ideological transformation and rebranded itself as a province of ISIS. 

ISIS, like its predecessor flourishes in exploiting local grievances to achieve its objective and increase its influence. Its poisonous ideology, ultra-violent methods and turbo-charged social media campaigns promoting hatred and violence sow political, communal and societal divisions and alter national and military policies for the worse through hyper-aggressive guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism. The results have been deadly as exemplified in Baghdad, Ankara, and Paris and equally successful in nurturing racial and religious war.  The Caucasian provinces present an opportunity for ISIS to fall back on should there wars in Syria and Iraq falter. Putin presents himself as Russia's strong-man and Russia's new brand of nationalism, yet if he is unable to provide security to the Russian people his regime will be subject to a potential backlash and increase political and economic pressure on his regime. 

As Crisis Group notes, the Caucasian problem will become a significant threat to Russian security if the grievances of Caucasian Muslims continue to be left unaddressed: "The Kremlin should aim to generate a more open and just system of government in the region, improve the rule of law, stop prosecuting religious dissent, continue investing in socio-economic development, especially education, and attempt more soft-power de-radicalisation if it wishes to deprive IS of a new front and an important source of recruits." 

Given the bloody history of the region which has endured two violent wars and caused tens of thousands of deaths among Chechens and Russians (civilian and military), the short-term gains of Russia in Syria and the receding influence of jihadist extremists in the region does not shut out the potential storm heading Russia's way; the prospect of renewed holy war and insurgency on its doorstep.

Putin's current string of personal coups, domestic and international, will return to haunt the Russian people. However, given the president's record of thriving on instability, the Caucasian crisis brewing may offer a future opportunity in times of domestic crisis. Low-intensity war and conflict have frequently been deployed by Putin to consolidate his brutal regime when and if it comes under fire. 

Nonetheless, there are questions as to whether war is a sustainable strategy for Putin. However, the current state of global affairs suits Putin's tactical and strategic outlook. Many Western politicians have struggled to adapt to this world which has produced the Information Age, perpetual warfare, the polarisation of politics across the political spectrum, economic stagnation, the proliferation of civil wars and conflicts across the globe, vast population movements and with regards to the Middle East, a bloody combination of authoritarian and decentralised tribal and sectarian bloodshed. In stark contrast, this dark, fractured world is perfectly designed for Putin's personality, his Machiavellian statecraft and doctrine of "manageable chaos". Catastrophic policymaking and failures by regional and Western policymakers alike in the wake of the Arab revolutions have allowed this deadly political blueprint to not only survive but flourish.