Who will take and hold Raqqa?
The hole in America’s anti-ISIS strategy
By Nicholas Grossman
Editor’s note: In this post, Politics and Policy researcher Nicholas Grossman shares information about a vital foreign policy issue, the fight against ISIS. Why do we include this in a blog about the election? This issue is likely to be one of the first problems our next president deals with in the Oval Office. With the election in the news, the new offensive against ISIS isn’t getting much attention, but this blog will fill in knowledge gaps.
First Mosul, then Raqqa. That’s the plan.
Once ISIS loses its Iraqi and Syrian capitals, the Islamic State will be no more. ISIS will live on as a transnational jihadist group, but any pretense to a caliphate will be gone. And with that, ISIS loses its top recruiting tool.
The attack on Mosul is underway, and appears headed for success. Militarily, it won’t be easy, but Iraqi forces (Iraqi army, Arab militias and the Kurdish Peshmerga, supported by American Special Operations Forces, intelligence and air power) outnumber and outgun ISIS, and will likely emerge victorious.
The attack on Raqqa will begin soon. Simultaneous assaults against both ISIS capitals will spread their forces thin, and prevent militants from fleeing the fighting in Mosul to set up defenses in Raqqa.
But Raqqa is in Syria, and it’s not clear which ground forces will take control of the city, and even less clear who will ensure post-ISIS stability.
The Iraqi political problem
Taking Mosul will be a significant achievement. Holding it will be harder.
ISIS was able to sweep across northern Iraq in 2014 because many Sunni Arabs greeted them as liberators. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki governed as a Shia sectarian, keeping Sunnis from positions of power in the government and military, and tacitly allowing Iranian-backed militias to repress Sunni Arabs in Iraq.
When ISIS attacked Mosul, the Shia-dominated Iraqi army folded, many Christians and other non-Sunnis fled, and Sunni Arabs accepted their new rulers as the lesser of two evils.
As a first step, before intervening to help Iraq fight ISIS, the United States pressured Maliki to step down, allowing a more inclusive leader, Haider al-Abadi, to take his place.
Now, to make the liberation of Mosul work, Abadi will have to balance the interests of Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds, as well as neighboring Turkey, which remains wary of Kurdish advancement.
To appease Turkey and the Sunni Arabs in Mosul, Kurdish forces are helping liberate surrounding villages, while leaving the assault on the main city to Iraqi Arabs, including many Sunnis.
The American-backed offensive will reestablish Iraqi sovereignty over Mosul. But in order to address the underlying political problems, locals will need some degree of autonomy from the majority Shia central government.
Otherwise, jihadists will once again find willing allies among the Sunni Arabs of northern Iraq.
The Syrian political problem
The politics of Raqqa are even more complicated.
ISIS found a relatively receptive population in Raqqa for the same reason it did in Mosul: Syrian Sunni Arabs felt oppressed by Bashar al Assad’s Alawite-dominated central government in Damascus.
As with the assault on Mosul, the US wants to avoid the appearance of foreign occupation by ensuring that local forces take the lead. But who will do it?
The plan for Mosul is to reestablish Iraqi sovereignty while allowing some local autonomy. But the United States and its allies will not allow Assad to reestablish sovereignty over Raqqa, even if Syrian government forces weren’t focused on the fight for Aleppo farther west.
Iraqi forces can’t do it either. Raqqa is about 150 miles west of the Iraqi border. Asking the Iraqi army to push that far into Syria would be overambitious, especially since they will have their hands full pacifying areas reclaimed from ISIS.
Without the Iraqi military and federal police, or a Syrian equivalent, the most capable local ground force is the US-backed, multi-ethnic Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The SDF includes some Sunni Arab units, which will be useful given the predominantly Sunni Arab population of Raqqa.
However, ISIS co-opted many local Sunni forces during its three years in control of Raqqa, and the largest component of the SDF comes from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG)
The US worked with the YPG before, most notably in the battle of Kobane in early 2015. Problem is, Turkey opposes them.
See the light purple running along the top of that map? That’s starting to look a lot like a nascent Kurdish state.
Preventing an independent Kurdistan is Turkey’s top priority. Kurdish insurgents have fought Turkey for decades, and Turkey fears a Kurdish state in northern Syria and Iraq would prompt additional attacks inside Turkey, as Turkish Kurds try to secede and join Kurdistan.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan just announced that a Turkish offensive in Syria will focus on Raqqa, as well as the town of Manbij to the northwest, which Kurdish forces recently took from ISIS.
Turkey has the military capabilities to take Raqqa, but its presence that deep into Syria will antagonize the Kurds, who have been on the front lines against ISIS the entire time.
Meanwhile, Arabs in Raqqa are unlikely to welcome either Turkish or Kurdish control.
And there’s the problem. There aren’t any ground forces that can both take Raqqa from ISIS and hold it to the local population’s satisfaction.
Degrade and destroy ISIS
America’s strategy to destroy the Islamic State looks promising in the short term.
If the assaults on Mosul and Raqqa both succeed, the U.S. will have degraded ISIS without committing a large ground presence, or getting stuck occupying parts of Iraq and Syria.
But if Turkey and the Kurds ignite a new conflict, America will have just traded one problem for another.
And if the political problems that led to ISIS remain unresolved, the stage is set for another Sunni Arab insurgency in the near future.
If the U.S. oversees the liberation of Mosul and Raqqa and then leaves, there won’t be anyone balancing the interests of local stakeholders, and America may find itself pulled back in before the next president’s term is up. However, if the United States commits too strongly, local forces have little incentive to assume responsibility themselves.
Striking the right balance will be the next president’s most immediate foreign policy challenge.
Nicholas Grossman is researcher in the Politics and Policy Research Program at the UI Public Policy Center and an adjunct lecturer in political science. He teaches classes on terrorism and insurgency; national security policy; and 21st century technology and warfare, primarily robotic systems. Learn more about Nicholas and his research here.
