There’s good news and bad news in the battle against Islamic State both in Syria/Iraq and in Libya.
The good news out of Libya is that Western-backed militias have taken Islamic State’s stronghold in the coastal city of Sirte, apparently with assistance from U.S. and European Special Operations Forces. This is a significant achievement, given that Sirte had emerged as the second major ISIS center after its strongholds in Syria and Iraq. It was even seen as a spot where ISIS could retreat if it is evicted from its heartland.
The bad news out of Libya is that there is still scant progress in putting together a functional government. As the Wall Street Journal noted, the U.N.-backed unity government has been hoping to restart oil production “from the Zueitina oil facility in northeast Libya and three other facilities. But commanders aligned with factions in the east threatened to attack tankers coming to accept shipments of oil authorized by the U.N.-backed government.”
Those eastern fighters are loyal to General Khalifa Haftar, a would-be strongman with Egyptian backing who refuses to recognize the authority of the unity government. As long as he and other militia leaders refuse to subordinate themselves to Libya’s nascent state, the country will continue to remain in a state of anarchy which will make it all too easy for ISIS or other extremist groups to find future safe havens. Marshall Sisi, the dictator of Egypt, should explain why he continues to back Haftar rather than to push him to unite with the internationally recognized government to bring some order to this oil-rich nation.
The picture is just as mixed in Syria and Iraq. Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, the senior U.S. military commander on the ground, just gave a press conference as he prepares to turn over command to his successor. He bragged that “the military campaigns in Iraq and Syria have taken 45,000 enemy combatants off the battlefield.”
But he went on to admit that U.S. intelligence estimates the number of ISIS fighters at 15,000 to 20,000–not so different from earlier estimates of 19,000 to 25,000. Once again, this shows why body counts don’t work as a metric of success in a counterinsurgency–the total number of enemy fighters is very difficult to estimate, and it fluctuates constantly. An entrenched insurgency in control of a substantial geographic area can always replenish its losses, as ISIS has done.
That is not to take away from the success that anti-ISIS forces have had in pushing its fighters out of Ramadi and Fallujah, among other places. More success should come before long when a largely Kurdish force evicts ISIS from the Syrian town of Manbij. By contrast, the long-rumored Mosul offensive still does not appear imminent.
But even “military success in Iraq and Syria will not necessarily mean the end of Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS],” MacFarland cautioned. “We can expect the enemy to adapt, to morph into a true insurgent force and terrorist organization capable of horrific attacks.”
In sum, it’s wrong to say that we are losing the war against ISIS. The anti-ISIS coalition is making substantial and real progress. We are, however, still a long way away from any real victory, which would require stabilizing the lands where ISIS now operates.
