The article is by Patrick Cockburn, who I believe is on the ground in Iraq. According to him, the Iraqi government is largely subservient to the Iranian government and relatively peaceful protests by Iraqi Sunnis are being brutally put down under the command of an Iranian general, Qassim Soleimani. Cockburn sees these conditions as possibly leading to a resurgence of Islamic State. The full article is here - I believe LRB allows people to access a certain number of free articles per month, so most people should be able to read it.
An excerpt:
America’s first act in the war on Iraq was an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein. In the early hours of the morning of 20 March 2003, forty cruise missiles were launched and bunker-buster bombs dropped on a compound on the outskirts of Baghdad where US intelligence wrongly believed him to be staying. Three years later a US airstrike succeeded in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, the organisation that would become Islamic State. Neither Saddam’s survival nor al-Zarqawi’s death had much impact on the course of events, but the White House remained convinced that eliminating leaders and other high-value targets was a war-winning strategy. There is little evidence to support this theory; but still, the assassination of demonic opponents is clearly good politics, allowing American presidents to impress voters with decisive action amid what have been messy, inconclusive wars.
The death last month of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had led IS since 2010, in a US raid in north-west Syria was celebrated in a self-glorifying speech by Donald Trump as proof that IS had been definitively destroyed. The claim had some substance: al-Baghdadi, who five years earlier had declared himself caliph in the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, was the most important surviving symbol of IS as a territorial state. The possession of an actual state – at its height it stretched across Syria and Iraq, from west of the Euphrates to east of the Tigris – distinguished IS from other militarised Islamic cults, like Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. For a brief, astonishing period, this reborn caliphate governed, in brutal but well-organised fashion, a population of ten million, claiming divine inspiration in its pursuit of true Islamic principles. Its rise was spectacular, but so was its fall: it lost its final piece of territory, a village in the desert on the Syrian side of the border, six months before al-Baghdadi’s death. He was reduced to moving from hideout to hideout in Idlib province, near the Turkish border, far from the IS heartlands, with little control over IS strategy or tactics – though it was always unclear whether he actually exercised full command.
The process of IS decision-making over the last ten years – and al-Baghdadi’s role in it – is a mystery. If he was in total control of operations between 2011 and 2014, he can take credit for rebuilding IS: he took advantage of the opportunities offered by the disintegration of Syria, and of Sunni resistance to a sectarian Shia government in Iraq. But after IS captured Mosul in June 2014, almost every decision taken or endorsed by al-Baghdadi was disastrous. The caliphate in any case posed too much of a threat to other powers to last for long, but al-Baghdadi accelerated its demise by effectively declaring war against the entire world. Not everyone thought it in their interests to fight the new theocratic quasi-state: Kurds in both Syria and Iraq at first stayed neutral, opportunistically expanding their own territories as IS battled the central governments in Baghdad and Damascus. But at the peak of IS success, its fighters attacked the Kurds in both countries without provocation, making enemies of them – and, fatally, guaranteeing US involvement on the Kurdish side. In al-Baghdadi’s vision, to be outside IS was to be an infidel by definition. Inevitably, the list of his opponents was all-encompassing: both the Americans and the Russians; both the Syrian government and the non-IS armed opposition to that government. Countries which had once tolerated IS – Turkey allowed forty thousand IS fighters to cross the border into IS territory – found that such covert co-operation was no guarantee that they themselves wouldn’t become a target.
IS systematically publicised its atrocities on the internet in order to terrorise its opponents, a tactic which at first worked well but ended up mobilising those it threatened – such as the Shia in Iraq, who outnumber the Sunni population three to one. Outnumbered and outgunned, IS would inevitably be ground down and crushed, with the Sunni community as a whole in the northern tier of the Middle East between the Iranian border and the Mediterranean suffering by association in the wake of their defeat.
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