India and France’s Dassault signed an $8.8bn contract that will provide the Indian Air Force with 36 Rafale fighter aircraft
Read MoreA Dassault Rafale multi-role fighter jet. Image: Wikipedia/Tim Felce.
A Dassault Rafale multi-role fighter jet. Image: Wikipedia/Tim Felce.
India and France’s Dassault signed an $8.8bn contract that will provide the Indian Air Force with 36 Rafale fighter aircraft
Read MoreThis is Part 2 of a 2-part series on ISIS’s strategic evolution. Part 1 can be read here.
In the past month, ISIS, in collaboration with its regional affiliates has killed at least 400 civilians in a series of major attacks. On October 31, the group’s Sinai Province bombed a Russian passenger jet flying from Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg, killing 224. Then on November 10, a series of suicide bombers targeted a Shia neighborhood of Beirut killing at least 43. Finally on November 13, nine attackers conducted a Mumbai-style assault on several regions around Paris, killing at least 129 people.
Such attacks are both unprecedented in terms of scope and scale. So how do they fit into what we know about ISIS’s strategy of continuous theater-based offense?
The simple answer is they don’t. Rather, they prove that the group’s baseline strategy of responding to military defeats with counterattacks elsewhere in Syria and Iraq is no longer viable.
Recent defeats have shown that the militant group has reached a limit in its ability to mount counterattacks. Notwithstanding a theater-wide Tet-style offensive in Iraq or Syria, the forces arrayed against ISIS are now too large in number, and too well organised to suffer new, large-scale losses of land. So instead, in order to maintain an air of invincibility, and gain a propaganda victory, the group is now engaging in spectacular international attacks.
Into the future, fresh ISIS offensives in Syria and Iraq are possible, if not probable, but are unlikely to have the same effect as those in the past. Furthermore, the rate of these offensives and their size will continue to decline as the group begins to feel the bite of continuous attrition from air-strikes and failed attacks. With the territory controlled by ISIS now in decline, the group is shifting more and more towards hitting soft international targets. This regression is in many ways similar to the focus Al Qaeda put on attacking the 'far enemy' (USA) over the 'near enemy' (Muslim countries) following the First Gulf War.
From a Western (and Russian) perspective, this is critically dangerous. With border security compromised due to large-scale arrival of refugees - the vast majority of which are legitimately fleeing the worsening regional conflict - security services have their work cut out for them. France alone has stated that it has a list of at least 10,000 “potential terror suspects”. Within such an environment, further attacks on soft targets are all but inevitable.
BREAKING: #Putin orders Def Min to co-operate with French naval group in #Syria as allies - @RT_com pic.twitter.com/sDYISLuwN9
— Conflict News (@Conflicts) November 17, 2015
However, with each successive attack which ISIS carries out, they will also increase the number of foreign nations intent on destroying their core territories in Syria and Iraq. Already there is talk of a possible alliance between Russia and France, the two nations who have suffered the most from this recent wave of international terrorism, in order to defeat ISIS in Syria. With this taken into consideration, these attacks, while horrifying from a security perspective, also represent the beginning of the end of ISIS as a conventional military threat.
Obviously, the defeat of ISIS’s conventional forces will not solve the root problems that lead to the group’s rise in the first place. But rather it will give international players and local partners the space to implement reconstruction and educational projects, in order to restore some level of order to the regions formerly occupied by the group. Should these steps not be taken, a tactically different ISIS will continue to wage an insurgency in the region, as well as presenting a continuing international threat.
In this episode of the Conflict News podcast, we discuss the impact of ISIS's Ramadan offensive. We first focus on their attacks within Syria, including Kobane and Hasakah, and look at the possibilities that these attacks originated in Turkey. Afterwards, we move on today discuss the wider regional attacks in Tunisia, Kuwait and today's large-scale assault in the Sinai region of Egypt. Finally, we end with a discussion on the rumours that Turkey would establish a so-called "buffer zone" within Northern Syria.
Late yesterday morning local time, a number of armed gunmen attacked the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in central Paris. The attack was the most deadly terrorist incident in France for at least the last 50 years. But precisely how did this event play out?
Since then a number of other events have played out possibly connected to the search for the suspects.