Islamic State Advances Despite Pentagon Airstrikes
By MARGARET COKER in Erbil, Iraq, JAY SOLOMON in Cairo and TAMER EL-GHOBASHY in Beirut
Wall Street Journal
Oct. 12, 2014 7:45 p.m. ET
Islamic State militants have gained territory in Iraq and Syria despite weeks of bombing by the U.S. and its allies, raising questions about the coalition’s strategy of trying to blunt the jihadists’ advance while local forces are being trained to meet the threat on the ground.
In Syria, fighters from Islamic State, also known as ISIS, have taken large sections of the city of Kobani in recent days, said Ismet Sheikh Hasan, the defense minister of the city’s Kurdish administration. “Most of the eastern and southern parts of the city have fallen under the ISIS control,” he said. “The situation is getting worse.”
This comes despite a week of heavy airstrikes around the city to help local Syrian Kurdish fighters keep Islamic State forces from the city center.
In Iraq, militant forces operating in a swath of territory the size of California have extended their control of the roads and commercial routes in strategically vital Anbar Province, which connects the capital Baghdad to Jordan and Syria.
Anbar, which has critical infrastructure and whose eastern edge lies only about 25 miles from Baghdad’s center, is also in danger of falling wholly under Islamic State control despite weeks of U.S. strikes aimed at weakening the group, local officials say.
The province’s chief of police was killed in a bombing Sunday, officials said, heightening unease over the government’s ability to fend off Islamic State forces.
Meanwhile, Anbar’s provincial council, led by Sunni Muslims opposed to the Shiite-Muslim dominated central government, formally asked for U.S. ground troops to be sent to defend it. The request, which was unlikely to be granted, was seen by politicians as calculated to embarrass Shiite Prime Minister Haider al Abadi. But it also highlighted the disarray among the loose alignment of groups fighting Islamic State.
The outskirts of Baghdad, meanwhile, have been rocked by sporadic car and suicide bombings, most recently on Saturday when four separate attacks killed more than 50 people.
Neither of the allied forces the U.S. had been counting on for help in the near term—the Iraqi army in the south or Turkish forces in the north—have been of much help, officials say. Iraq’s army has often proven unable to stop Islamic State forces, and Turkey hasn’t engaged in the fight despite its professed desire to halt the jihadists.
“First of all on ISIS: They’re winning and we’re not,” Republican Sen. John McCain told CNN on Sunday. Mr. McCain, a frequent advocate of more aggressive action, added: “There has to be a fundamental reevaluation of what we’re doing...Pinprick bombing is not working.”
The gains by Islamic State placed the Obama administration on the defensive and even led President Barack Obama’s top military advisor to again break from stated policy and suggest U.S. ground forces may be needed to aid Iraq’s government.
Secretary of State John Kerry, on a trip to the Mideast, conceded that Khobani may fall and that the American public needed to be prepared for “ups and downs” in what’s expected to be a long campaign.
“We have said from day one that it will take a period of time to bring the coalition together,” Mr. Kerry said in Cairo. “We expect, as we have said, there will be ups and downs...But we are confident that we can pull this strategy together.”
From the start of Washington’s diplomatic push this summer for an international alliance against Islamic State, Western leaders have outlined a two-prong strategy. Airstrikes were seen as a limited tool to stop the militants’ advance, while Washington and its allies create local ground forces that could take on the group and reverse its territorial gains.
The strategy is working best in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.
There, the U.S.-allied Kurdish defense forces known as peshmerga have been able to take advantage of U.S. and allied air support to fortify their positions and even encroach on those held by Islamic State.
On Friday, for example, Kurdish troops south of Kirkuk repulsed an apparent Islamic State attack aimed at the regional capital of Kirkuk, causing about a dozen casualties and pushing the militants back almost one mile along a major commercial road, said two officials involved in the fight.
But elsewhere, the fight against Islamic State is proving to be as complicated, and vexing, as U.S. officials warned.
In Syria, where Kobani lies just across the Turkish border, the campaign has become deeply entangled in Turkish domestic politics and the Turkish government’s fight against the Syrian Kurdish group fighting against Islamic State.
Turkey, while opposed to Islamic State, also considers the Kurdish fighters to be members of a terrorist organization and has declined to intervene in the fight across the border, as some had hoped it would.
A top United Nations official on Friday warned that an Islamic State capture of Kobani could touch off a massacre of the remaining inhabitants. Most civilians from the area—about 200,000 of them—have fled to Turkey, but the U.N. special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said there were up to 700 civilians, including elderly people, cut off in the heart of the city.
“Some are very poor and don’t know how they would survive in Turkey, where the government is reluctant to help them,” said Idres Nassan, the deputy prime minister of the local Kobani government, urging Turkey to open a humanitarian corridor to help more people flee.
The strategy’s biggest weakness in Iraq, officials there say, is the glacial pace of cobbling together an Iraqi political alliance between Sunnis willing to join with the Shiite-controlled central government to rebuild a national military force to fight Islamic State more effectively.
Key to that effort is getting Sunni tribal and political leaders and the Shiite political leaders to agree on a new initiative to build a new Sunni-staffed national guard to defend the central Iraqi front, including Baghdad, against further Islamic State advances.
U.S. officials have been on a lobbying blitz for most of the last two weeks to sign up major Iraqi Sunni tribal figures to the guard units and pressure the country’s new Shiite prime minister to deliver votes from his constituency, which hold a majority in parliament but who are deeply wary about the political allegiances of the Sunni leaders.
But the initiative has been shelved over a holiday week, and it remains unclear when the parliament might take it up.
Meanwhile, Sunnis in Iraq are themselves also increasingly divided. On Saturday, the Anbar council’s extraordinary step of formally asking Iraq’s central government to allow U.S. ground troops to enter Anbar set off a series of recriminations and finger pointing.
The request, largely seen as a political maneuver to embarrass Iraqi’s Shia dominated central government by the council in the Sunni majority province, came as Islamic State militants surrounded an army camp in the city of Hit, trapping soldiers inside, officials said on Sunday.
The call for American ground troops, however unlikely to be met, caused fresh rifts in Anbar which threatened to weaken the already shaky coalition of government forces working with tribal fighters to fend off the Islamic State assault. A senior leader of the tribal forces on Sunday, Wissam al Hardan, said the council’s call amounted to “treason.”
Mr. Abadi’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
While the militant group is yet to take the provincial capital of Ramadi, officials in Anbar warn that they are losing their grip on the city to a highly organized and disciplined insurgency that has surrounded military bases and put a choke hold on trade from Jordan, effectively controlling movements of goods and people in the region.
While the Islamic State didn’t claim immediate responsibility for the attack that killed Brig. Gen. Ahmed Al-Dulaimi, the top police official in Anbar, the incident has contributed to a growing sense that Iraqi security forces are losing their tenuous hold on Iraq’s largest region.
Anbar is home to Iraq’s second largest dam, several military bases and camps and is seen as an important buffer between the Islamic State’s declared capital in Syria to the east and Baghdad to the west.
Brig. Gen. Dulaimi had been among a group of security and local government officials that had sounded an alarm last week that Anbar was on the brink of collapse.
Mr. Kerry and other Obama administration officials are continuing to try to strengthen the coalition fighting Islamic State.
Over the weekend, U.S. officials said Turkey agreed to join Saudi Arabia and begin training Syrian opposition forces fighting the militia. But Pentagon officials acknowledged it will take months to train these forces and that it was unclear if Iraqi and Kurdish forces already in the fight can be strengthened.
—Asa Fitch and Ayla Albayrak contributed to this article.
Write to Margaret Coker at margaret.coker@wsj.com, Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com and Tamer El-Ghobashy at tamer.el-ghobashy@wsj.com
By MARGARET COKER in Erbil, Iraq, JAY SOLOMON in Cairo and TAMER EL-GHOBASHY in Beirut
Wall Street Journal
Oct. 12, 2014 7:45 p.m. ET
Islamic State militants have gained territory in Iraq and Syria despite weeks of bombing by the U.S. and its allies, raising questions about the coalition’s strategy of trying to blunt the jihadists’ advance while local forces are being trained to meet the threat on the ground.
In Syria, fighters from Islamic State, also known as ISIS, have taken large sections of the city of Kobani in recent days, said Ismet Sheikh Hasan, the defense minister of the city’s Kurdish administration. “Most of the eastern and southern parts of the city have fallen under the ISIS control,” he said. “The situation is getting worse.”
This comes despite a week of heavy airstrikes around the city to help local Syrian Kurdish fighters keep Islamic State forces from the city center.
In Iraq, militant forces operating in a swath of territory the size of California have extended their control of the roads and commercial routes in strategically vital Anbar Province, which connects the capital Baghdad to Jordan and Syria.
Anbar, which has critical infrastructure and whose eastern edge lies only about 25 miles from Baghdad’s center, is also in danger of falling wholly under Islamic State control despite weeks of U.S. strikes aimed at weakening the group, local officials say.
The province’s chief of police was killed in a bombing Sunday, officials said, heightening unease over the government’s ability to fend off Islamic State forces.
Meanwhile, Anbar’s provincial council, led by Sunni Muslims opposed to the Shiite-Muslim dominated central government, formally asked for U.S. ground troops to be sent to defend it. The request, which was unlikely to be granted, was seen by politicians as calculated to embarrass Shiite Prime Minister Haider al Abadi. But it also highlighted the disarray among the loose alignment of groups fighting Islamic State.
The outskirts of Baghdad, meanwhile, have been rocked by sporadic car and suicide bombings, most recently on Saturday when four separate attacks killed more than 50 people.
Neither of the allied forces the U.S. had been counting on for help in the near term—the Iraqi army in the south or Turkish forces in the north—have been of much help, officials say. Iraq’s army has often proven unable to stop Islamic State forces, and Turkey hasn’t engaged in the fight despite its professed desire to halt the jihadists.
“First of all on ISIS: They’re winning and we’re not,” Republican Sen. John McCain told CNN on Sunday. Mr. McCain, a frequent advocate of more aggressive action, added: “There has to be a fundamental reevaluation of what we’re doing...Pinprick bombing is not working.”
The gains by Islamic State placed the Obama administration on the defensive and even led President Barack Obama’s top military advisor to again break from stated policy and suggest U.S. ground forces may be needed to aid Iraq’s government.
Secretary of State John Kerry, on a trip to the Mideast, conceded that Khobani may fall and that the American public needed to be prepared for “ups and downs” in what’s expected to be a long campaign.
“We have said from day one that it will take a period of time to bring the coalition together,” Mr. Kerry said in Cairo. “We expect, as we have said, there will be ups and downs...But we are confident that we can pull this strategy together.”
From the start of Washington’s diplomatic push this summer for an international alliance against Islamic State, Western leaders have outlined a two-prong strategy. Airstrikes were seen as a limited tool to stop the militants’ advance, while Washington and its allies create local ground forces that could take on the group and reverse its territorial gains.
The strategy is working best in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.
There, the U.S.-allied Kurdish defense forces known as peshmerga have been able to take advantage of U.S. and allied air support to fortify their positions and even encroach on those held by Islamic State.
On Friday, for example, Kurdish troops south of Kirkuk repulsed an apparent Islamic State attack aimed at the regional capital of Kirkuk, causing about a dozen casualties and pushing the militants back almost one mile along a major commercial road, said two officials involved in the fight.
But elsewhere, the fight against Islamic State is proving to be as complicated, and vexing, as U.S. officials warned.
In Syria, where Kobani lies just across the Turkish border, the campaign has become deeply entangled in Turkish domestic politics and the Turkish government’s fight against the Syrian Kurdish group fighting against Islamic State.
Turkey, while opposed to Islamic State, also considers the Kurdish fighters to be members of a terrorist organization and has declined to intervene in the fight across the border, as some had hoped it would.
A top United Nations official on Friday warned that an Islamic State capture of Kobani could touch off a massacre of the remaining inhabitants. Most civilians from the area—about 200,000 of them—have fled to Turkey, but the U.N. special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said there were up to 700 civilians, including elderly people, cut off in the heart of the city.
“Some are very poor and don’t know how they would survive in Turkey, where the government is reluctant to help them,” said Idres Nassan, the deputy prime minister of the local Kobani government, urging Turkey to open a humanitarian corridor to help more people flee.
The strategy’s biggest weakness in Iraq, officials there say, is the glacial pace of cobbling together an Iraqi political alliance between Sunnis willing to join with the Shiite-controlled central government to rebuild a national military force to fight Islamic State more effectively.
Key to that effort is getting Sunni tribal and political leaders and the Shiite political leaders to agree on a new initiative to build a new Sunni-staffed national guard to defend the central Iraqi front, including Baghdad, against further Islamic State advances.
U.S. officials have been on a lobbying blitz for most of the last two weeks to sign up major Iraqi Sunni tribal figures to the guard units and pressure the country’s new Shiite prime minister to deliver votes from his constituency, which hold a majority in parliament but who are deeply wary about the political allegiances of the Sunni leaders.
But the initiative has been shelved over a holiday week, and it remains unclear when the parliament might take it up.
Meanwhile, Sunnis in Iraq are themselves also increasingly divided. On Saturday, the Anbar council’s extraordinary step of formally asking Iraq’s central government to allow U.S. ground troops to enter Anbar set off a series of recriminations and finger pointing.
The request, largely seen as a political maneuver to embarrass Iraqi’s Shia dominated central government by the council in the Sunni majority province, came as Islamic State militants surrounded an army camp in the city of Hit, trapping soldiers inside, officials said on Sunday.
The call for American ground troops, however unlikely to be met, caused fresh rifts in Anbar which threatened to weaken the already shaky coalition of government forces working with tribal fighters to fend off the Islamic State assault. A senior leader of the tribal forces on Sunday, Wissam al Hardan, said the council’s call amounted to “treason.”
Mr. Abadi’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
While the militant group is yet to take the provincial capital of Ramadi, officials in Anbar warn that they are losing their grip on the city to a highly organized and disciplined insurgency that has surrounded military bases and put a choke hold on trade from Jordan, effectively controlling movements of goods and people in the region.
While the Islamic State didn’t claim immediate responsibility for the attack that killed Brig. Gen. Ahmed Al-Dulaimi, the top police official in Anbar, the incident has contributed to a growing sense that Iraqi security forces are losing their tenuous hold on Iraq’s largest region.
Anbar is home to Iraq’s second largest dam, several military bases and camps and is seen as an important buffer between the Islamic State’s declared capital in Syria to the east and Baghdad to the west.
Brig. Gen. Dulaimi had been among a group of security and local government officials that had sounded an alarm last week that Anbar was on the brink of collapse.
Mr. Kerry and other Obama administration officials are continuing to try to strengthen the coalition fighting Islamic State.
Over the weekend, U.S. officials said Turkey agreed to join Saudi Arabia and begin training Syrian opposition forces fighting the militia. But Pentagon officials acknowledged it will take months to train these forces and that it was unclear if Iraqi and Kurdish forces already in the fight can be strengthened.
—Asa Fitch and Ayla Albayrak contributed to this article.
Write to Margaret Coker at margaret.coker@wsj.com, Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com and Tamer El-Ghobashy at tamer.el-ghobashy@wsj.com
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