AP Photo/Jake Simkin
In this Wednesday, November 19, 2014 photo, a female Kurdish fighter takes aim in Kobani, Syria. On the front lines of the battle for Kobani, Kurdish female fighters have been playing a major role in helping defend the Syrian town from an onslaught by the Islamic State extremist group.
Following the brutal November 13 Paris attacks, which France's President François Holland labeled an act of war, both France and the United States have ramped up their respective bombing campaigns against the Islamic State (also knows an ISIS, ISIL and Daesh). More recently, French and U.S. warplanes have bombed Raqqa, the ersatz capital of ISIS, as well as various elements of the ISIS-controlled Syrian oil sector. Unfortunately, air power alone has done precious little to combat the spread and institutionalization of the Islamic State.
However, when air power has been mobilized in support of capable ground forces-namely the various Kurdish armed forces operating in Iraq and Syria-tactical victories have followed, notably in the town of al-Hawl and at Sinjar. This type of cooperation between local ground forces and Western air power is the most effective strategic option in the fight against ISIS. Kurds and their allies are native to the areas in which they operate, and have demonstrated the ability to form new political and military structures to replace those established by the Islamic State.
There are two key components to effectively combat ISIS. First, the Western allies must commit to patient and persistent diplomacy in Syria and Iraq, as the conflict is likely to last for several more years. Second, and most importantly, the coalition of states fighting ISIS must contribute to establishing local political institutions in the areas surrounding IS-held territory in order to slowly suffocate the Islamic State with options for better governance.
Allied air power alone will accomplish little unless used in support of capable ground forces. While American F-22s and A-10s can batter an enemy's infrastructure and military forces, they cannot pacify local areas nor can they provide responsive governance to local populations. In order to protect and provide for local communities capable and locally connected ground forces are critical.
The Islamic State's own operations in Syria are telling. It has predicated the creation of a new Sunni-dominated Islamic Caliphate on local support for its clearly articulated set of legal and social governing institutions that seek to empower Sunnis vis-à-vis all other confessional groups. These institutions have helped ISIS establish its perverse new order, raise tax revenue, recruit for military operations, and provide some measure of accountability to the populations it controls. Similarly, the Al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra has been building its own incipient governance structures in the swaths of territory it controls inside Syria.
In effect, the Islamic State is dug in. Even if a majority of its fighters were killed-as Al Qaeda in Iraq's forces were believed to have been by the middle of 2011-the institutions it has built up can be operated by a small number of committed followers, thereby keeping this pernicious organization alive.
Continued allied cooperation with local Kurdish forces, despite the complex alliances and long-standing conflicts between the Kurds and the states in which they reside, will help undermine Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra governments.
The secular Kurdish groups fighting ISIS have quasi-democratic and egalitarian political structures that incorporate not just Kurds but all local religious groups, and empower women as well. Indeed, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria has created small self-governing communities premised on the ideas of direct democracy. These communities are designed to cooperate with one another across borders. In each municipality the three top officials must include one Kurd, one Arab, and one Assyrian or Armenian Christian, and one of these three must be a woman. This egalitarian style of governance allows for a wide cross-section of Kurds to join the fight against ISIS, which has produced some of the most committed and capable forces in the fight against ISIS.
To this point in the fight against the Islamic State, however, no Kurdish political party has affected notable Arab participation in its operations. Further, there has been no significant Arab support for the expansion of Kurdish governance structures into non-Kurdish areas. However, the considerable success that the PYD and other Kurdish political parties have had governing majority-Kurdish areas since 2011 suggests that they have extensive capacity for effective government.
The PYD and its militia the People's Protection Units (YPG) govern an area in Syria known as the Rojava (literally 'west' in Kurdish) region. In 2012 Bashar al-Assad devolved control of this area, which straddles the border between Syria and Turkey, to the PYD, gave 300,000 Kurds citizenship and withdrew most of his combat forces south. The area has remained under PYD control since, and the YPG has contributed to the liberation of the key town of Tel Abyad on the Turkish border and another 10 towns within 50 kilometers of Raqqa.
In Iraq, the militias associated with the largest Kurdish parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) played critical roles in the battle to retake ISIS-held Sinjar. These political parties have dominated Kurdish issues in Iraq since 1991 when the Kurdish parliament was created. Iraqi Kurds have had a semi-democratic body politic for nearly a quarter century. Masoud Barzani, the leader of the KDP was also very active in the design of the Iraqi constitution in 2005, albeit to maximize the Kurds' leverage in the post-Saddam Iraqi state.
Thus, the most democratically inclined areas of Iraq and Syria are also those that have produced two of the most competent fighting forces in the region.
Kurdish battlefield successes, and their ability to hold the ground they have liberated from ISIS likely contributed to the creation, on October 10, of the 3,200-member Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The SDF, led by Kurdish fighters, is a combination of 13 militias including Syrian Arabs Assyrians, Armenians, and Turkmen. It was the SDF that led the recapture of the village of al-Hawl and some 200 other villages in northeast Syria, close to the border with Iraq.
The Kurds' ability to sustain their military successes is due in no small part to the fact that they operate almost exclusively in Kurdish-majority areas in both Iraq and Syria. The populations in the areas that Kurdish forces have liberated are ethnically and politically aligned with them. As a result, local populations have welcomed the governance structures of the liberating forces. The creation of the SDF, assuming that it provides non-Kurds equal power within the organization, might facilitate Kurdish ability to successfully fight and hold territory in non-Kurdish areas. Arabs in SDF could help expand Kurdish methods of governance into predominantly Arab areas of Syria (and potentially Iraq), which could also help pull invaluable oil fields out of ISIS's control.
The allied responsibility in Kurdish operations must remain one of military, economic, and logistical support. Weapons and funding must be distributed equally to all relevant Kurdish factions in order to limit the reliance that groups like the PYD have on Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian regime still pays Kurdish teachers' salaries, as well as those of doctors and some public sector employees.
A focus on the equitable distribution of arms and money must also meet the needs of the Arab components of SDF. Currently, Arab groups are viewed as weaker than their Kurdish allies. This disproportionate balance of power between Arab groups and their Kurdish allies could ultimately undermine the stability of the SDF as well as the expansion of Kurdish-style governance into Arab regions of Syria.
Western allies must also endeavor to streamline the operations of Kurdish military and intelligence organizations. In their current incarnations both Iraqi Kurdish parties, the KDP and the PUK, have parallel military and intelligence structures, which cooperate only on short-term interests; this is partly due to their competing external sponsors. While the KDP has a long-standing relationship with Turkey, the PUK receives material support from Iran. These external sponsors have a direct effect how each group operates with one another and on the battlefield.
Relations between Iraqi and Syrian Kurds have only recently begun to warm in the face of the ISIS threat, due to differences in governing styles, and the latter's ideological relationship with Turkey's Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK). KDP relations with Turkey have limited the former's military cooperation with the PKK. Turkey considers the PKK a terrorist organization and continues to bomb its positions in northern Syria and Iraq, despite the PKK's contributions to the fight against ISIS. Moreover, Ankara has refused to engage with the Syrian PYD in constructive relations because the latter is a direct offshoot of the PKK. However, the common battle against ISIS has helped improve relations between the Kurdish parties, if not among their state sponsors.
Western allies must also ensure that Kurdish military success do not devolve into sectarianism. An October 2015 report by Amnesty International alleged that YPG forces forcibly displaced and demolished the homes of Arabs and Turkmen from villages in northern Syria. The U.S. and its allies cannot allow such incidents to reoccur. They would deal a severe blow to the newly formed SDF, and hurt the Kurdish-led forces' ability to extend their style of governance into non-Kurdish areas.
Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has estimated that the fight against ISIS may require several decades. The United States and it allies must be prepared for a long-term commitment to the Kurds as well as to the SDF. Western states need to be prepared for persistent and patient diplomacy not just with the Kurds, but also, and potentially more importantly, with Russia, Turkey, Bashar al-Assad, and Iran.
Working with the Kurds presents core challenges to the U.S. global alliance system as it is currently conceived.
Turkey has an ongoing conflict with the PKK, which is actively fighting against ISIS. Currently, the United States and the EU consider the PKK a terrorist organization, even though the PKK renounced violence against Turkey and withdrew its demands for independence in 2005. If the PKK continues to spearhead the fight against ISIS, and subsequently requires American or allied assistance, the Western powers will be presented with an uncomfortable choice: support the fight against ISIS, or maintain their commitment to Turkey. How the West navigates this will have serious repercussions for the region.
Iran and the Assad regime work with several of the Kurdish factions fighting against ISIS, and both work with Russia. American and European military planners must work with this alliance, or at least not work at cross-purposes with these actors, in order to degrade ISIS. This will require giving up the short-term goal of removing Bashar al-Assad from power in favor of a larger coalition against the Islamic State, especially given the increasing number of Iranian and Hezbollah forces operating inside Syria.
Much as the U.S. and its allies would like to get rid of Assad, few other realistic strategic options for combating ISIS and its institutions exist. No international will exists for an open-ended deployment of Western troops due to the overwhelming costs in terms of men, money and material. Neither American nor allied military forces have demonstrated the capacity to build or fix local systems of government in the region. In fact, American and allied forces have consistently failed to establish-at great human and financial cost-effective local military or political partners in Iraq and Syria. U.S. and allied military forces are efficient tools of war, not instruments of institution building. For these and other reasons, President Obama has announced that he has no intention of putting more American troops on the ground-beyond the 3,550 U.S. "trainers" in Iraq and the additional 50 special operations personnel in Syria.
The key to combating ISIS is building parallel, legitimate structures of governance, which liberated areas can, and will want to, adopt. The Kurds and their allies in SDF are the forces most capable of accomplishing this. The United States and its allies must take a step back in this conflict and endeavor to patiently shepherd this unruly flock of actors. If the West can adjust to this role, it may just have a chance at defeating ISIS without absorbing unnecessary costs.
