A military incursion ordered by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the plains of Sinjar to thwart Kurdish rebels belonging to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is stoking old tensions and prompting new questions over Turkey’s partnership with its Arab neighbours, like reported by middleeastmonitor.com.

“We said we would go into Sinjar,” Erdogan told Turkey’s Trabzon community on Sunday. “Now operations have begun.” Turkey’s confidence failed to convince officials in Baghdad. Under the “everything is under control” guise, Iraq’s Joint Operations Command (JOC) assured observers that no foreign troops had entered the country, contradicting Erdogan’s bullish statements in Trabzon. “There is no reason for troops to cross the Iraqi border,” the JOC insisted.

Turkey’s move centred on its self-assigned task to eradicate the scourge of PKK terrorism and rebel enclaves. This is a topic that representatives from both states have gathered today in Ankara to discuss.

The latest episode of the Turkish military advance and its entry into the northern Syrian town of Afrin last week represent the two dots that observers keen to understand the logic of such developments will inevitably join.

Erdogan’s need to curb the expansionist drive of PKK rebels in Afrin and now Sinjar is what the two operations have in common, though it is noticeably out of step with Turkey’s earlier reluctance about joining the Washington-led anti-Daesh coalition. Self-authorisation of more military operations is the path that Turkey has carved to defend itself, it claims, against the PKK and allies from the confederal party of Kurdish rebels in Syria, the PYD. The protection of Iraq’s minority Kurdish Yazidi community was the banner that has allowed some of these groups to settle more permanently in areas that they helped to liberate.

Turkey’s foreign policy manoeuvres therefore mirror a rather undecided or adaptive approach at best, following the conquest of Daesh across both spheres in June 2014. The siege of Kobani by the terrorist group that united rebel Kurdish forces was a scenario that replayed itself in Sinjar months later when the Kurdish Peshmerga enlisted the PKK’s help to expel Daesh. Since reclaiming the city in 2015, Sinjar sat firmly in the palm of Peshmerga forces until Iraqi forces took Kirkuk and surrounding plains following the post-referendum fallout late last year.

The wavering policies adopted by Erdogan’s government in Ankara prioritise the eradication of the PKK but are effective only when coupled with the military entrenchment of Turkish forces regionally. The cost is high but rewarding as far as Turkey is concerned when assessing the progress it has made in its three decade-long battle with the region’s Kurdish protagonists.

The meltdown of state authority and institutional decay in neighbouring Iraq and Syria has allowed these actors to grow taller, but the hour for Turkey to undertake what it views as necessary has finally struck.

It is feared that Mosul will be the next sphere into which Turkey may project its influence through military means. The post-2003 transnational Kurdish awakening is the reasoning that the government in Ankara has used to bolster its military capabilities. It is not the only one, though. The failures and inaction on the part of Baghdad to uproot Kurdish guerrilla fighters from its northern provinces is an oft-cited motive for foreign military action.

Baghdad walks a tightrope in this sense, building on the one hand a strategic partnership with Turkey whilst not shying away from accusing it of illegally invading parts of its oil-rich nation on numerous counts over the past three years. The rhetoric from Baghdad this time around, however, has been softened enough not to accuse Erdogan of trespassing.

The Sinjar tale has since evolved with incumbent Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi dispatching army brigades to replace PKK fighters ordered to evacuate, as local sources allied to the government claim.

Many predict that Turkey might revive the ghost of Mosul’s past, dreaming of its intervention against unwelcome Iranian-backed militia units, but the “blood and fire” with which sectarian enemies would flood the region, as Erdogan said in October 2016, has inspired moving words not military action. Cherry-picking its enemies may yield short terms gains but could cost Turkey some of its allies.

Turkey has done well to dodge the hostile bullets that onlookers and Turkey’s Kurd-sympathetic allies have fired its way due to Ankara’s policies towards Kurdish regional forces. What is certain, if the past decade is anything to go by, is that military victories — whether achieved by America, Iran or Turkey — are ephemeral if hearts and minds are not won.

What Turkey choses and the sides it seeks to win over will not be decided independently, but informed by the actions of regional chess masters and how they deal with the factions that Ankara opposes, which are hell-bent on moulding an independent Kurdish polity. Contradictions certainly abound in Turkey’s military incursions in both Iraq and Syria.

The U.S. military carried out its first ever drone strike against al-Qaida militants in southern Libya this weekend, signaling a possibly significant expansion of the American counterterrorism campaign in the North African nation, like reported by tampabay.com.

Until now, the Pentagon had focused its counterterrorism strikes in Libya almost exclusively on Islamic State fighters and operatives farther north — eight since President Donald Trump took office. In 2016, the military conducted nearly 500 airstrikes in the coastal city of Sirte over several months to destroy the Islamic State’s stronghold there.

But the attack Saturday that the military’s Africa Command said had killed two militants — later identified by a spokeswoman as belonging to al-Qaida’s branch in northwestern Africa — took place in the country’s southwest, a notorious haven for a deadly mix of al-Qaida and other extremist groups that also operate in the Sahel region of Niger, Chad, Mali and Algeria.

“This appears to be the continuation of expanding AFRICOM activity in Libya’s ungoverned areas,” said Deborah K. Jones, who served as U.S. ambassador to Libya from 2013 to 2015, referring to the Africa Command.

A missile fired by the U.S. drone struck a house in Ubari, 435 miles south of Tripoli, in an area close to major oil fields that was wracked by violent ethnic feuding in 2015. In a statement, the military’s Africa Command said the strike had targeted militants with al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, an affiliate also known as AQIM, and had been carried out in coordination with the U.N.-backed unity government in Tripoli. “At this time, we assess no civilians were killed in this strike,” the statement said.

The strike came as the Trump administration has been reassessing the U.S. military commitment in North and West Africa after the ambush in Niger last fall that killed four U.S. soldiers. The Pentagon has been preparing to fly armed drone missions from Niger’s capital, Niamey, a step that diplomats and analysts say could further widen the Pentagon’s shadow war in this part of the continent.

Ubari is at the intersection of the powerful criminal and jihadi currents that have washed across Libya in recent years. Roughly equidistant from Libya’s borders with Niger, Chad and Algeria, the area’s seminomadic tribesmen are heavily involved in the smuggling of weapons, drugs and illegal migrants through the lawless deserts of southern Libya.

Some have allied with Islamist militias, including al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which operates across Algeria, Mali, Niger and Libya.

In the statement Saturday, Robyn M. Mack, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Africa Command, said that it was still assessing the results of the strike and that the purpose had been “to deny terrorists freedom of action and degrade their ability to reconsolidate.”

But the command did not answer several questions, including: To what extent is the attack the start of an escalating campaign against a broad spectrum of extremists in northwestern Africa, or a one-off strike against high-profile al-Qaida operatives?

In summer 2010, the National Intelligence Council organized a small, one-day conference with Europe-based academics to get their read on possible futures for the jihadist movement. Osama Bin Laden was still alive, but the core al-Qaeda organization was beginning to come under rising pressure in Pakistan as a result of increasingly intense drone strikes, like reported by warontherocks.com.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was degraded thanks to the surge of U.S. forces and the Sunni Awakening. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was emerging as the most dangerous jihadist group in the world. We looked for trends and debated the future of the core of the al-Qaeda organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan, whether AQAP might take up the mantle of leadership and what that would augur, and who could emerge as the next bin Laden, among other things.

Today, with the core of the so-called Islamic State (ISIL) increasingly squeezed in Syria and Iraq the jihadist movement may be facing an even bigger inflection point. Will al-Qaeda be able to regenerate and fill the void? Could another group — perhaps an ISIL or al-Qaeda affiliate, or maybe an independent actor — take the reins? Or might we witness the atomization of the jihadist movement after years in which ISIL and al-Qaeda became its competing lodestars? In either case, what would this mean for the long-running fault line between globalism and nationalism? And what of the 40,000-plus foreign fighters who flocked to Syria and Iraq, or the technological advances that ISIL exploited to recruit them and direct or inspire attacks around the world? To help clarify the problem, we brought together three scholar-practitioners — Kim Cragin, Josh Geltzer, and Daveed Gartenstein-Ross — to weigh in on what lies ahead for the jihadist movement and the threats its adherents pose.

Evolution of the Jihadist Movement: A Brief History

Any assessment of where the jihadist movement might go, must account for how it has evolved to date. Despite their pretensions to universalism, jihadists have often disagreed over issues such as which enemy to prioritize, where to fight, and whether it is appropriate to attack fellow Muslims. The two main currents in the jihadist movement before 9/11 were revolutionary and pan-Islamic. Revolutionaries prioritized changing the political order in their own homelands by overthrowing the ruling powers. Pan-Islamic jihadists were focused on defending the umma — the worldwide community of Muslims — and liberating all occupied Muslim lands.

Al-Qaeda was one of the few truly multinational jihadist groups that existed prior to 9/11. It developed its concept of global jihad while based in Sudan during the first half of the 1990s and then in Afghanistan for the latter half. Al-Qaeda’s global jihadist ideology prioritized attacks against the United States as the first step in a larger plan to create the conditions for toppling apostate regimes in the Arab world.

Bin Laden and his inner circle believed that as long as the United States could project power into the region, it would be able to pressure Muslim countries to bend to its will and keep jihadists from toppling local regimes. Driving America out of the region would enable jihadists to confront local regimes directly and inspire the youth to rise up and join these revolutions. At that point, al-Qaeda leaders believed that regimes in the Middle East and Persian Gulf would collapse.

Numerous groups expanded their enemy hierarchies after 9/11. While jihadists who had previously been pan-Islamic began pursuing revolutionary action, some revolutionary groups grafted pan-Islamic or global jihad onto their preexisting local agendas. The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq contributed to this phenomenon, muddying the waters between pan-Islamic jihad against non-Muslim invaders and global jihad against the United States specifically.

Al-Qaeda also evolved. Its leaders refined and expanded their organization’s rationale for action, blending takfiri thought, which justifies attacking apostate Muslims, with the requirement to fight the United States and its Western allies. Being more overt about its revolutionary tendencies helped al-Qaeda reduce the barriers to alliances with other organizations. This became increasingly important once al-Qaeda started adding affiliates. As a result, although bin Laden continued to prioritize the United States, al-Qaeda increasingly boasted an agenda that made less of a distinction between local and global enemies.

By 2011, analysts worried more about some of al-Qaeda’s affiliates, especially AQAP, than they did about the core organization, which was under significant pressure in Pakistan as a result of U.S. drone strikes. Initially, it appeared that successful political transitions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen following the Arab Spring would undermine the jihadist narrative that violence was a necessary handmaiden for revolution or that the United States was willing to prop up autocratic regimes. Yet, far from being a death knell, the revolutions ushered in by the Arab Spring reinvigorated the jihadist movement. The weakening or outright removal of police states created space for mobilization in places where jihadists had previously had little room to maneuver and enabled a level of activity unforeseen hitherto.

As the Arab Spring gained steam in 2011, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took the reins of al-Qaeda after bin Laden was killed, directed AQI to form a group and deploy it across the border into Syria. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of AQI, sent a contingent of battle-hardened fighters to form Jabhat al-Nusra (JN). It became one of the most effective rebel groups in the Syrian conflict. In April 2013, al-Baghdadi issued a statement officially absorbing JN and renaming his organization the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIL). The move both revealed and exacerbated a rift between the two groups. JN prioritized jihad against the Assad regime in Syria, was willing to cooperate with other rebel groups to realize this objective, and pursued a population-centric approach. ISIL sought to use Syria as a launching pad for a renewed offensive in Iraq and remained committed to the old AQI strategy of intimidation and sectarian provocation that sought to pit Sunnis and Shiites against one another. Before long, ISIL controlled substantial territory in Syria. These battlefield successes, combined with a mastery of social media, helped ISIL attract the lion’s share of foreign fighters in Syria.

In June, four months after al-Qaeda disowned it, ISIL launched its major military offensive in Iraq that captured the country’s second largest city, Mosul. Afterward, al-Baghdadi announced the reestablishment of the caliphate and declared himself the leader of the umma. Numerous jihadist groups — some of them previously loyal to al-Qaeda — offered their allegiance. Although primarily focused on building its proto-state, ISIL also used the territory as a base for launching international terrorist attacks. Indeed, as Kim Cragin points out below, the group conducted more external operations — attacks conducted outside Syria, Iraq, or its 25 so-called provinces (used interchangeably with affiliates) — than the al-Qaeda network (AQN) did during a similar time period in its heyday. ISIL’s ability to conduct external operations has diminished since the group lost Mosul in July 2017 and its fighters fled Raqqa, Syria the following October. These losses have also called into question the wisdom of ISIL’s aggressive approach, fueled speculation about whether al-Qaeda will resume the titular leadership mantel of the jihadist movement, and ignited debates about the nature of the jihadist threat in the years to come.

Looking Ahead: The Future of the Jihadist Movement

All three contributors to this roundtable point out ways in which the essence of the jihadist movement remains largely unchanged, while simultaneously identifying various factors that are shaping its ongoing evolution. Each essay has its own take on which elements will be the most critical. Four issues are worth highlighting:

1. The Local and Geopolitical Terrain: Analysts have worried for years about jihadists’ access to ungoverned or poorly-governed territory that could be used for training, communications, and operational planning. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross observes, although ISIL has lost most of its territory in Iraq and Syria, jihadist safe havens and enclaves have grown more numerous since 9/11, especially in countries roiled by the so-called Arab Spring. Josh Geltzer also points out that the core ISIL organization is not yet defeated. Eradicating it is likely to prove challenging, in large part because of the continuing complexities of the overall dynamic in Iraq and Syria. Both authors also sound the warning about Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — al-Qaeda’s erstwhile affiliate in Syria — and the dangers that other al-Qaeda and ISIL affiliates continue to pose because of their ability to exploit both local grievances and grinding conflicts in weak states. Kim Cragin foresees no end to these ongoing conflicts. She argues the status quo is likely to remain in places where al-Qaeda or ISIL affiliates operate, with the important caveat that veteran foreign fighters will bring new tactical knowledge to these conflicts that could make regional groups even more lethal and push them towards greater brutality. Cragin contends a more dramatic impact from foreign fighters will likely be felt in many of the Muslim majority countries where ISIL and al-Qaeda do not have affiliates.
2. Tensions in the Movement: Scholars identified two fault lines that have defined the jihadist movement. One is between centralization and decentralization, and the other is between globalism and nationalism. Just as al-Qaeda affiliates have thrived even with the core of the organization under enormous pressure, it is unlikely that the fate of ISIL affiliates rests entirely on ISIL’s fortunes in Syria and Iraq. Moreover, Geltzer contends that as ISIL’s core loses territorial control, it is possible that some of its affiliates will distance themselves from the central organization. Gartenstein-Ross argues forcefully that analysts should not be too eager to view such a development as evidence of decentralization within the wider movement. Despite the difficulties the core organizations of al-Qaeda and ISIL are each facing, he asserts that the trend within the jihadist movement has been toward centralization. Global jihadism has simultaneously continued to spread according to Gartenstein-Ross. Most groups likely will continue to fixate primarily on regional objectives, but more of them have also adopted a transnational vision and continue to engage in transnational activities even if they do not prioritize attacks against Western targets. The spread of foreign fighters, which Cragin documents, could reinforce this trend.
3. Technology and Foreign Fighters: According to Cragin, the most immediate threat to the West — North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand — depends on foreign fighter returnees, specifically whether they are motivated and able to conduct attacks or recruit another generation of Western jihadists. As Cragin notes, foreign fighters have conducted the majority of external operations directed by ISIL leaders. Gartenstein-Ross and Geltzer zero in on how jihadists take advantage of technological advances to enable these operations. Jihadists have combined mastery of social media with the use of end-to-end encryption, which is often inaccessible to governments, to radicalize new adherents, mobilize them, and provide the kind of assistance to remote operatives that physical terrorist networks used to provide in person.
4. Leadership of the Movement: All three contributors to this roundtable posit that ISIL and al-Qaeda appear poised to remain key players in the jihadist movement, even if some of their affiliates may be better positioned in the near term. Their respective leaders — al-Zawahiri of al-Qaeda and al-Baghdadi of ISIL — both lay claim to leadership of the movement. The competition is not simply organizational. Al-Qaeda leaders have criticized ISIL for splintering the movement, declaring a Caliphate that did not have staying power, and pursuing a brutal, takfiri strategy that has often included attacking other mujahideen (Muslim holy warriors). Al-Zawahiri lacks charisma and has struggled to motivate followers like bin Laden did, but ISIL’s losses in Iraq and Syria create space for al-Qaeda to reclaim its vanguard position. As Cragin notes, al-Qaeda has taken more of a population-centric approach and sought to present itself as a less virulent alternative to ISIL. Geltzer and Gartenstein-Ross identify various developments, such as the fortunes of HTS in Syria and its relationship with al-Qaeda’s core, which could influence whether al-Qaeda is successful in its bid to retake the titular mantle of the jihadist movement. Geltzer also posits that ISIL’s ingenuity and pioneering use of the Internet may have paved the way for a new jihadist group to capture some of the jihadist “market share” by combining online technologies with a compelling narrative and a leadership capable of inspiring followers.

Although plenty of us who came together that summer day in 2010 noted the potential for instability in the Middle East — not exactly a bold prediction — no one foresaw the Arab revolutions that would begin months later or the effects they would have on the jihadist movement. Nor did anyone predict that, within a half decade, a former soccer enthusiast in Iraq who had done time in a U.S.-administered prison camp would command the most powerful jihadist group the world had ever seen and declare himself the leader of the Caliphate. What we tried to do, and what the three authors of the following essays have done so well, is to identify the trends and factors that could inform the trajectory of the jihadist movement. Then, like now, major actors in the movement were under strain, but the fundamentals suggested the jihadist threat would not disappear any time soon.

Israel has admitted it was behind an airstrike that destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor, ending a decade of silence over the attack in September 2007, like reported by newsweek.com?

Military censors lifted a 10-year order of secrecy on the mission, Reuters reported, revealing that Israeli F-15 and F-16 warplanes targeted the al-Kubar facility near the city of Deir Ezzor in the east of the country.

It said the reactor was “an emerging existential threat to Israel and the entire region.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also released newly declassified video footage of the attack—known as Operation Orchard—as well as photographs and intelligence documents detailing the bombing and the planning of the mission, which used almost 20 tons of munitions.

Israel claimed that the reactor was being built with the help of North Korea and was only months away from activation. It kept the strikes a secret to avoid Syrian retaliation and possible escalation into a regional war.

Military commanders were told to place their troops on high alert in the hours leading up to the attack in case Syria decided to respond, The Times of Israel said. Although the attack was openly discussed abroad after its success, Israel imposed a domestic media blackout on the story to ensure that no details were leaked, the BBC reported.

Syria has consistently denied that there were nuclear facilities at the site, though the International Atomic Energy Agency has said it was “very likely” to have been a nuclear reactor.

Mossad—Israel’s national intelligence service—suspected that a nuclear site was being constructed since 2006, when they spotted the buildings, which they called the “Rubik’s Cube.” In March 2007, Mossad obtained photos from inside the facility, which showed North Korean officials at the site and confirmed the presence of a plutonium reactor, The Times of Israel reported.

Israeli officials then contacted the U.S. with their concerns and the CIA was asked to analyze the site. Although they agreed that Syria had likely built a nuclear reactor, U.S. officials were hesitant to carry out an airstrike as they were not convinced that the al-Kubar facility was capable of producing nuclear weapons. As such, Israel decided to proceed alone.

A video of the strike shows several bombs hitting the facility. Warplanes then make a second pass and bomb the rubble to ensure its complete destruction. The whole operation took four hours, the IDF said.

“On the night between 5-6 September 2007, Israeli air force fighter jets successfully struck and destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor in development,” an IDF statement said. “The reactor was close to being completed.”

The announcement will be seen as a warning to Iran, which was conducting its own nuclear program until it agreed to halt development in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions in 2015. However, President Donald Trump and Iranian leaders have questioned whether the deal can be maintained. If it collapses, Iran will likely restart its nuclear project.

“The motivation of our enemies has grown in recent years, but so too the might of the IDF,” Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Wednesday. “Everyone in the Middle East would do well to internalize this equation,” he said, suggesting “a substantial threat to Israel and the region, in the form of a nuclear reactor, was being built in Syria.”

The Deir Ezzor region was captured and held for several years by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) during the Syrian Civil War. “One could only imagine how much havoc they could have wreaked with a nuclear facility in their hands,” the IDF statement said.

“Greetings, softer than the breeze of Barada …. I send my tears, which will never dry, O Damascus.” The opening line of Ahmed Shawqi’s famous poem was written as news of the Syrian defeat by the French in 1920 reached Egypt. Less than two years earlier, Faisal I had entered Damascus and raised the flag of Arab nationalism. The jubilation was felt across the Levant. Egypt, confident in its own newly discovered national identity, had little appetite for the illusions of Arab nationalism, but the pain of Damascus could not be ignored. Euphoria would visit the city again in 1958 as the Damascene crowd crowned Nasser the region’s indisputable king, but those moments were few and short lived, and soon gave way to disappointment. That city would know little but pain as coup gave way to coup, before the specter of Hafez Al-Assad rose tormenting its inhabitants, like reported by hoover.org.

Nearly seven years have passed since the outbreak of protests in Syria calling for change. By now, many illusions have been shattered. First was the illusion of the ‘reformer son’ of the late strongman. The shy, eye doctor was surely different from his father. John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi had fallen for his charm during the Bush years, and the Obama administration still held the same hope. It was not to be. Syria’s great poet Nezar Qabbani had described the breed well in his Autobiography of an Arab Man of the Sword “I decided to ride this people from now until Judgment Day.” The son of the butcher of Hama would outshine his father adding the names of Aleppo, Homs, Daraa, and countless others to his list of butchery. Next was the illusion of a regional solution led by Turkey. Erdogan may have fancied himself an Ottoman sultan, but Suleiman the Magnificent, he was not. A more appropriate resemblance was with Abdul Hamid II, a ruler of a crumbling state daydreaming of grandiose designs,

There was, of course, the hope of a future democratic Syria, as many brave young Syrians dreamed of, but the Syria of 2011 was a country that had known little but cruelty. “Men are not angels,” Fouad Ajami had written of Libya’s descent into carnage, “these were the hatreds and the wrath that the ruler himself had sown; he had reaped what he had planted.” The sectarian divides had been too large to overcome and the wounds too deep to heal. Then there was the illusion of the Syrian conflict remaining within the country’s borders, but as Charles Hill has written “Syria is the roundabout in which all the forces face one another and spin off consequences, for good or ill, around the compass.” What happens in Syria can never remain just in Syria, as the Iraqis soon discovered. We turn to Ajami again; “If the Sunni Arabs had lost Baghdad to the Shia, there was suddenly within grasp the prospect of restoring Damascus.”

Most painful was the illusion of a world consciousness that would be moved by atrocities and a U.S. President who had drawn a red line. Obama, a man who “has made a fetish of caution,” as Ajami described him, had little interest or sympathy for the children of the Levant. An accommodation with Iran would be signed in Vienna with the blood of Syrians.

A year ago, President Trump came into office riding a wave of discontent, not just of economic frustrations, but also disillusionment with America’s adventure in the Middle East. Long gone were the days of enthusiasm for the fall of Saddam’s statue. Candidate Trump had made his skepticism of nation building in the Middle East known, and his skepticism was warranted. America had visited the region once already, and had no appetite for another try. In between Bush’s adventure and Obama’s inaction, the administration has chosen a middle course: bombing Assad for his use of chemical weapons, allowing the Pentagon to send more troops and to keep them there, and drawing a red line east of the Euphrates, as the Russians soon discovered; but troop levels and firepower is no political strategy, let alone a political solution and settlement.

If America has lost its excitement for adventure, and Obama’s abandonment has been exposed for its hollowness, neither are the current measures equipped to achieve a much better result. The Islamic State may be defeated for now, but a fire smolders under the ashes. Assad continues his savagery aided by Russian airpower and Iranian militias. Israel’s security is threatened by an expanding Iranian presence, and Turkey is unhappy with the U.S. assistance to Syria’s Kurds. Besides half a million killed, there are more than five million refugees with not only no prospect of returning home, but with others soon to follow as enclave after city falls to Assad’s bombardment. Confusion reigns supreme. The U.S. is an ally of the Kurds east of the Euphrates, but abandons them west of the river; it will neither accept an Assad victory nor is it interested in his defeat.

At the center of the U.S. failure to develop a coherent strategy towards Syria lay two illusions that continue to shape the administration’s approach to the conflict. The first illusion is that there remains and should remain a country named Syria. Writing of Sykes Picot, Ajami had warned that “it is rarely a good idea to draw maps in a hurry,” but equally problematic is accepting those same maps as set in stone. Even if Assad were to manage to defeat the various militias fighting him, rebuilding Syria as a functional state is beyond his abilities, let alone within his interests. Neither will the Sunni majority accept him, nor does he want a Syria with an overwhelming Sunni majority. “The bonds between them and their rulers,” as Ajami warned, “have been severed.” Too much blood has been spilled and the wound will not heal. More likely is an Assad strategy of emptying the country of as many Sunnis as possible and achieving a more balanced demographic balance, even if this means giving up some territory on the periphery of his core territory.

A more problematic illusion is that of an Assad regime fighting militias. While the United States has removed its Ambassador from Syria, it has technically remained committed to a mindset that views Assad and his cronies as a regime, albeit a brutal one. The reality is starkly different. There is today no Syrian regime. There are instead various militias fighting each other, and Assad is merely the leader, if we can even call him that as the Russians humiliation of him during Putin’s December 2017 visit exposed.

Abandoning these two remaining illusions would allow the United States to think clearly about what its goals in Syria should be. While the U.S. cannot completely end the Syrian civil war, curtailing the level of destruction and bloodshed remains an objective, not merely on humanitarian grounds, but also on strategic grounds, as the prolonged violence will continue to attract foreign intervention and have a spillover effect on neighboring countries destabilizing them further. While a military confrontation with Russia is to be avoided, a Russian victory has to be denied. A Putin victory in Syria would embolden him further in expanding his influence in the Middle East, undermining U.S. interests and sending a clear message that he is the new sheriff in the region.

And while stopping Iranian involvement in the Levant is a long term project, checking Iranian moves and containing those remains within immediate U.S. interests. Most important in this regard is reinforcing the Israeli red line in the southern part of Syria, ensuring that no Iranian expansion takes place in the area. Instead of hoping for a permanent solution to the Syrian civil war, the U.S. should aim for an equilibrium in Syria. The United States is incapable of stopping Syrians and their neighbors from killing each other, but it can surely remove their ability to inflict so much death and increase their costs of doing so.

How to go about achieving these goals? As things stand, there is no reason for Assad and his masters to compromise. From the Russian and Iranian perspective, they are winning. With the current cards in their favor, what is needed is a reshuffling of the deck to force the parties to come to an agreement. As long as Bashar Al Assad remains in the picture, there is little reason to believe a settlement of sorts is possible. As such, the U.S. should explore ways to offer a combination of carrots and sticks to Alawites and other supporters of Assad, assuring them that no massacre would take place if Assad is removed, while also inflicting damage to the Assad militia’s power. The goal should be to convince enough supporters of Assad that there is no path forward for victory in Syria and that an accommodation, without Assad, is both possible and desirable for their long term interests. Assad has no place in the future of Syria, and a settlement of scores with the man responsible for the deaths of countless American soldiers in Iraq is long overdue.

What of the Syrians longing for a better future? The world is a cruel place. In 2011, a path forward for them could have been devised, a path that would have avoided countless deaths and destruction, but we are not in 2011. For these inhabitants of the land once known as Syria, I have little to offer, beyond returning to another line from Shawqi’s poem “Children of Syria, leave behind your wishes … Forget your dreams, just forget them!”

Seven years ago, when Syrian protesters called for “a day of rage” against Bashar al-Assad, there were few signs that they would have an impact. Three years later, as the protests transformed into a civil war, one that would eventually draw in the region’s powers, it seemed a matter of when, not if, Assad would go the way of his fellow strongmen in Tunisia and Egypt. But in March 2018 on Wednesday, which by some accounts marks the seventh anniversary of the start of the conflict, Assad appears no closer to leaving office than he was seven years ago, like reported by theatlantic.com.

Assad’s has kept his position, at great cost to Syria. But it would be wrong to say he is in control. It’s true that he, with the support of Russia and Iran, has held onto Syria’s major cities, including Damascus and Aleppo, as well as much of the West of the country. (Russia’s military intervention in the conflict in late 2015  gave Assad a decisive edge.) Most of the Syrian population that didn’t flee the country now lives in areas controlled by the government. But Syria as a whole has effectively collapsed. Before the civil war, the country was, by Arab standards, solidly middle income. It is estimated that it will take another two decades after the fighting ends, whenever that happens, for Syria to regain its pre-war economic status. The price tag to rebuild the country is estimated at $200 billion or more if the conflict endures—money neither Assad, nor his patrons in Moscow or Tehran, have to spare.

Then there is the human cost: More than 500,000 people killed, 5 million refugees, entire cities flattened. There are few signs the fighting is close to stopping—despite a 30-day, UN-mandated ceasefire that went into effect last month. Assad continues to bomb Eastern Ghouta, the region outside Damascus held by rebels including anti-Assad Islamists . The death toll there since the most recent assault began last month exceeds 1,000. With the international community doing nothing to stop him, it is all but certain Assad will sooner or later capture the area. When he does that, he will have defeated one of the last major pockets of resistance. But even then, it will be hard to say that he “won” the war.

“It’s very difficult for us, as Syrians, who have watched this from the beginning of the revolution. For us it feels like … there’s nothing really being done to help the people have been suffering for over seven years,” said Lina Attar, a Syrian American architect from Aleppo who is the co-founder of the Karam Foundation, an aid organization that works with displaced Syrians. “And so when you hear the words ‘Assad has won,’ they are very difficult words to hear. As a Syrian you think, ‘Won over what?’”

It’s unclear—and highly unlikely—that Assad can survive in power without Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah support. He says he wants to regain control of all of Syria, but may have to settle for only a bit more than he has now. The Kurds, for example, are unlikely to give up the autonomous territory they’ve gained in the northeast of the country. And though ISIS has largely been defeated in the country, its enemies are now turning their guns on each other in at least three more potential conflicts playing out on Syrian territory, that pit Turkey against the Syrian Kurds, Israel against Iran, and the U.S. against Russia.

“The way we look at it is Assad won the war, but the rest of the region doesn’t see it that way,” Andrew Tabler, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute, said in a recent interview. “They see the outcome very differently. They see Iranian activities there. They see Russian activity. They see Kurdish activities.”

Syria was once the power broker in Lebanon and a major force in the region but is now dependent on the largesse of its few allies. Assad’s military forces are depleted. The most effective pro-Assad fighting forces are militia members and foreign fighters. And Tabler argues that an outcome in which Assad remains in power is unacceptable to both Turkey and Israel.  “That threatens to morph the Syrian civil war into the Syria war,” he said. “This is very similar to what happened in Lebanon in the 1980s—where you had a civil war, initially driven by Palestinian activities there, and then after they departed the scene, the war continued. International players became involved in the Lebanon war—and it tends to prolong wars and makes the outcome far more difficult to obtain.” In Syria’s case, Israel is threatened by the presence of Iranian forces in a country on its border; in Turkey’s, it sees the Kurds as menacing its own territorial integrity. Both powers have been drawn further into Syria’s fighting in recent weeks.

The world looks much different now than it did in the 1980s, however. For one, the countries in the region are embroiled in other regional conflicts: the Iranians and Saudis are engaged in a devastating proxy war in Yemen; Turkey is perennially worried about Kurds, including in Iraq, and external foes, real and perceived; the Trump administration’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem has not yet set off the kind of violence that many feared, but given the political realities in the region there’s no assurance it won’t. Nor does the U.S. seem particularly interested in doing anything more in Syria than fight ISIS—a policy that has carried over from the Obama years when the president declined to enforce a “red line” on Assad’s use of chemical weapons on civilians. Assad has now done so multiple times.

On the other hand, other countries in the region are preparing for life with Assad staying in place—no matter how distasteful that may sound to them. “Those countries that directly border Syria, I think you are beginning to see capitalized into their strategic calculation this notion of Assad staying,” Mona Yacoubian, the senior adviser for Syria, Middle East, and North Africa at the U.S. Institute for Peace, told me. “And I think that’s most apparent in Jordan where actions by the Jordanian government suggest that they do believe he is there to stay at least for the short- to medium term.” The country has moved toward opening the official crossing with Syria, is providing less support for Syrian rebels in the south, and has been pushing to get Syrian refugees [currently in Jordan] to return to de-escalation zones negotiated with the Russians.

As for the population that’s left in Syria, four years ago, the UN estimated that 80 percent of the country lived in poverty and that life expectancy had fallen by 20 years, to a little over 55 years. Nor does Syria have hope for the kind of international financing poured into Iraq and Afghanistan for reconstruction, with mixed results. International funders are reluctant to spend that kind of money in Syria for fear it will benefit a regime accused of war crimes. “And when you look at the United Nations, the Security Council, the large aid agencies, and everybody saying … whatever is happening right now needs to stop, but there’s no true action to intervene to end this war, that’s very disheartening,” Attar said. “And if Assad survives all of this, it’s really because of the world’s inaction.”

Syrian Arab militiamen leading the Turkish attack on Afrin in northern Syria are threatening to massacre its Kurdish population unless they convert to the variant of Islam espoused by Isis and al-Qaeda. In the past such demands have preceded the mass killings of sectarian and ethnic minorities in both Syria and Iraq, like reported by counterpunch.org.

In one video a militia fighter flanked by others describes the Kurds as “infidels” and issues a stark warning, saying “by Allah, if you repent and come back to Allah, then know that you are our brothers. But if you refuse, then we see that your heads are ripe, and that it’s time for us to pluck them.” Though the Kurds in Afrin are Sunni Muslims, Isis and al-Qaeda traditionally punish those who fail to subscribe to their beliefs as heretics deserving death.

“The video is 100 per cent authentic,” said Rami Abdulrahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which released it, in an interview with The Independent. He adds that he is very concerned about the fate of some Yazidi villages in Afrin captured by the advancing Turkish forces, saying he has seen videos taken by the militiamen themselves in one of which “an elderly Yazidi man is questioned by them, asking him how many times he prays a day.”

Such interrogations of Yazidis by Isis to prove that they were not Muslims often preceded the killings, rapes and the taking of Yazidi women as sex slaves when Isis seized Yazidi areas in northern Iraq in 2014. Mr Abdulrahman, who is the leading human rights monitor in Syria with a network of informants throughout the country, says he is worried that international attention is entirely focused on the Syrian army assault on Eastern Ghouta and “nobody is talking about” the potential slaughter of the Kurds and other minorities in Afrin.

He says that the two situations are similar since “President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have taken 60 per cent of Ghouta and [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s forces have taken 60 per cent of Afrin.” He says that as many as one million Kurds may be threatened and adds that it is becoming extremely difficult for them to escape from Afrin because Syrian government checkpoints on the only road leading south to Aleppo “are demanding bribes of up to $4,000 per family to let people through.”

Mr Abdulrahman points to growing evidence drawn from videos taken by themselves of militiamen claiming to be members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) that the units advancing ahead of regular Turkish troops are extreme jihadis. This has previously been asserted by a former Isis member in an interview published by The Independent last month who said that many of his former comrades had been recruited and retrained by the Turkish military. He said that Isis recruits had been instructed by Turkish trainers not to use their traditional tactics, such as the of extensive use of car bombs, because this would identify them as terrorists. He suspected that Isis fighters would be used as cannon fodder in Turkey’s war against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and then discarded.

As the Turkish army closes in on Afrin and the Syrian army penetrates deeply into the opposition stronghold of Eastern Ghouta, people in both areas fear that they will be the victims of enforced demographic change. One Kurdish observer in Iraq said that he thought Mr Erdogan, who has claimed that the majority in Afrin is not Kurdish, will “bring in Turkmen and others to replace the Kurdish population.”

Isis is particularly hostile to the US-backed YPG, as its most effective enemy which drove it out of a quarter of Syrian territory and captured the de facto Isis capital of Raqqa last October after a four-month siege.

As Mr Abdulrahman says, the sieges of Afrin and Eastern Ghouta have much in common, though the number of those trapped in Afrin may be larger. Motives for refusing to leave are also much the same. “I will never leave Ghouta,” said Haytham Bakkar, an anti-government journalist living there, speaking just as the present Syrian Army assault was getting underway. “We have lived here for hundreds and thousands of years. Here our grandparents lived. Here are our houses and tombs. We were born here and we will die here. Our souls and roots are here.”

Bakkar says that most people in Eastern Ghouta are convinced that their departure is part of a broader government plan to make drastic demographic changes whereby their property would be given to others. He says that even if people survived the dangerous journey out of the area, they did not want “to watch TV news and see strangers living in our homes.”

Kurds make a similar calculation, but it is also becoming extremely dangerous for them to try to flee. Precedents have already been set for ethnic and sectarian cleansing all over Syria since 2011 as those in control oust members of other communities.

The YPG is a formidable force and the YPG spokesman Nouri Mahmoud says that the group has 10,000 fighters in the enclave who would fight to the end. He says that Kurds are already being displaced and “in one village alone 600 people were told to go.” He said that the Kurds feared a genocide was in the making and complained that “the international media focus on Eastern Ghouta has given the Turks the opportunity to step up their attack on Afrin without the rest of the world paying much attention”. The Kurdish authorities are trying to publicise the sufferings of civilians in Afrin, but are so far not having much success.

In the long term – and possibly in the short term – Afrin may prove to be indefensible. It is surrounded by Turkish forces and their FSA allies who are vastly superior in numbers and heavy weapons and are able to use air power and artillery without opposition.

None of the foreign players in the Syrian crisis show any sign of intervening against Turkey. The Turks were able to invade Afrin on 20 January because Russia decided it would no longer defend its airspace as it had been doing previously. Kurdish leaders say they believe that Russia, Iran and Turkey have agreed that Turkey will get Afrin, possibly in exchange for the Turks agreeing to drop their support for the one big remaining anti-Assad enclave in Idlib.

The Turkish offensive against the Kurds in Afrin will not end when it falls, but its elimination may set the stage for further Turkish attacks against Kurdish-held territory further east. This will bring the Turks into a confrontation with the Washington which will try mediate, but, if US forces are to stay in Syria, then they will still need the Kurds as their one ally on the ground. But, if the fall of Afrin is accompanied by mass killings and ethnic cleansing, then the war in northern Syria is about to get a whole lot worse.

Nearly seven years after the killing of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda is numerically larger and present in more countries than at any other time in its history, like reported by lowyinstitute.org. Indeed, the movement now boasts of some 40,000 men under arms, with approximately 10,000–20,000 fighters in Syria; 7000–9000 in Somalia; 5000 in Libya; 4000 in Yemen; a similar number dispersed throughout other countries across the Maghreb and Sahel; 3000 in Indonesia; and approximately 1000 in South Asia. From north-west Africa to South East Asia, al-Qaeda has been able to knit together a global movement of some two dozen local franchises.

How is this possible? There are four reasons.

First, al-Qaeda proved remarkably adept at exploiting the upheaval and instability that swept across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 and 2012 during the Arab Spring. “The mujahidin around the world are going through a moment of elation,” the movement’s chief propagandist, Anwar al-Awlaki, wrote in the March 2011 issue of Inspire, the online magazine of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, “and I wonder whether the West is aware of the upsurge of mujahidin activity in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Arabia, Algeria, and Morocco?”

The thousands of hardened al-Qaeda prisoners Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi freed, who fled to Libya, Turkey, Syria, Yemen, and other locales, endowed the movement at an opportune moment with combat expertise, leadership skills, and foot soldiers. Then, the military coup that subsequently toppled Morsi greatly enhanced al-Qaeda’s credibility and appeal: validating its new leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s repeated admonitions to Muslims not to trust the West or have any faith in the sanctity of democratic processes.

In fact, long before the Arab Spring had run its course, al-Awlaki accurately intuited that regional and international counterterrorism cooperation would both slacken and become more inconsistent as governments were lulled into a false sense of complacency that the threat of terrorism had passed. He also correctly anticipated that voices sympathetic to al-Qaeda’s aims and objectives would henceforth have greater freedom and acquire new platforms from which to propagate their views. Finally, al-Awlaki perceived that the spreading unrest would create new geographic openings and opportunities for al-Qaeda’s intervention.

“Is the West aware of what is happening,” he wondered, only months before being killed in a US drone strike, “or are they asleep with drapes covering their eyes?” For al-Qaeda, the answer was obvious.

Second, the civil unrest that unfolded in Syria as part of the Arab Spring, and rapidly gave way to outright civil war, breathed new life into al-Qaeda’s efforts to appear relevant and reinsert itself into the region’s politics. Within weeks of bin Laden’s killing, for instance, al-Zawahiri had publicly affirmed al-Qaeda’s support for the uprisings in Syria, as well as those in Yemen and Libya.

Taking advantage of the historical rivalry between Sunni and Shi’a (of which Syria’s ruling Alawites are a minority sect), al-Qaeda’s incessant, blatantly sectarian messaging sharpened these frictions and enabled the group to establish a presence in Syria – a country long-heralded by Muslims as sacred territory. One of al-Zawahiri’s first official acts as al-Qaeda emir was to order Abu-Mohammad al-Julani, Syrian veteran of the Iraqi insurgency, to return home and establish the local al-Qaeda franchise that would eventually become Jabhat al-Nusra, now known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Third, al-Zawahiri simultaneously implemented an ambitious strategy to protect the movement’s remaining senior leadership and consolidate its influence in new and existing theatres. His highest priority was to ensure that al-Qaeda became impervious to a single, knockout blow of its entire senior leadership.

Accordingly, scores of the movement’s surviving leaders and senior commanders were dispersed to Syria, Iran, Turkey, Libya, and Yemen, among other countries, with only a small, hard core remaining in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Advances in commercial, off-the-shelf digital communications, alongside successive public revelations of US and allied intelligence services’ eavesdropping capabilities, have enabled al-Qaeda to utilise end-to-end encryption technology to a point where As-Sahab, al-Qaeda’s communications department, brags of maintaining regular contact between al-Zawahiri and his minions in far-flung battle zones, such as the Levant and Africa.

With both a resilient senior command structure and effective communications network now in place, al-Qaeda is especially well-positioned to exploit ISIS’s weakening military position and territorial losses across the region, and once again claim its pre-eminent position at the vanguard of the violent Salafi-jihadi struggle.

Finally, the moratorium on mass-casualty operations imposed by al-Zawahiri, especially with respect to those attacks that might kill Muslim civilians, has enabled al-Qaeda and its franchises to present themselves as “moderate extremists” – a less unhinged and ostensibly more palatable rival to ISIS. This development also supports al-Zawahiri’s ancillary strategy of allowing ISIS to stay in the limelight, taking all the heat and absorbing the blows from the coalition arrayed against it, while al-Qaeda unobtrusively rebuilds its military strength and basks in its new-found cachet as moderate in contrast to the unconstrained ISIS.

Accordingly, with ISIS lamentably still active and al-Qaeda clearly resurgent, today we arguably face the most perilous international security environment since 2001, with serious threats emanating from not one but two terrorist movements who both have cultivated a myriad of branches and affiliates, thereby enhancing their capabilities and ensuring their longevity.

As Syrian government forces crush the country’s largest remaining rebel strongholdsand with Bashar al-Assad apparently here to stay, Syria is turning into an arena for three new proxy conflicts. In the south, Israel is facing off against Iran; in the northern region of Afrin, Turkey is fighting the Kurds. Meanwhile, in the eastern provinces, Syrian Democratic Forces are pitted against the Russian-backed Syrian armed forces, like reported by psmag.com.

If and when the Syrian conflict proper comes to a close, these three major fault lines are likely to become ever more pronounced. Together, they indicate that the future of Middle Eastern security is still bitterly contested by major players with potentially irreconcilable interests.

ISRAEL VERSUS IRAN

When the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, held up what he said was a piece of a downed Iranian drone at the 2018 Munich Security Conference, he raised the stakes in an escalating proxy conflict with Iran. The drone was allegedly shot down by Israeli forces after having penetrated Israeli airspace from Syria.

Shortly before this, an Israeli fighter jet was shot down by Syrian anti-aircraft fire while the Israeli military engaged directly with Iranian forces in southern Syria. Netanyahu duly dialed up his rhetoric and made it clear that Israel would be prepared to go to war not only with Iranian proxies, but with Iran itself.

Israel sees Iran’s presence in Syria as part of a bigger jigsaw of Iranian Shia militias in Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon. Netanyahu knows that the Trump administration is fully in line with Israeli foreign policy here: both are intent on containing Iran, Syria’s most important backer besides Russia.

RUSSIA TREADS CAREFULLY

On the face of it, even Russia’s military role in Syria is diminishing as the Damascus government makes strategic gains. But while Vladimir Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian forces in December of 2017, it has since been reported that Russian private contractors are recruiting mercenaries to fight in place of the regular Russian army.

These speculations have only intensified since United States forces killed Russian irregular forces in clashes near the eastern city of Deir ez-Zor in mid-February. Eastern Syria in particular is likely to remain contested territory—not least because it’s host to the country’s major oil and gas fields.

Away from the battlefield, Russia has also sidelined the U.S. and the United Nations in diplomatic initiatives. While Moscow brought Turkey and Iran on board for peace talks in Astana to discuss a post-conflict political settlement for Syria, the Russian-Iranian-Turkish “Astana format” has not proved as cordial as many hoped.

TURKEY AND THE KURDISH FACTOR

While Moscow does not list the Kurdistan Workers Party, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), and the People’s Protection Units as terrorist organizations, Turkey considers any recognition of them a dangerous encouragement of Kurdish nationalism. Sure enough, when Russia invited the PYD to the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in Sochi, the invitation met with a diplomatic backlash from both Turkey and the Syrian opposition.

Ankara is determined not to allow the creation of an autonomous Kurdish territory in northern Syria. Hence its Operation Olive Branch against the PYD in the Afrin region, a highly assertive military initiative that Turkey says will continue in spite of a 30-day ceasefire greed upon by the U.N. Security Council on February 24th.

Turkey’s Afrin operation has not gone down well, even with Turkey’s erstwhile allies. Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, publicly announced that Moscow rejects “attempts by external forces to … promote a Syrian and regional agenda that has nothing in common with the legitimate interests of the Kurdish people”. Likewise, Iran condemned Turkey’s moves in Afrin.

Both Moscow and Tehran, however, have refrained from criticizing Turkey’s incursion too loudly. Russia and Iran’s acquiescence worries Damascus greatly, as Assad fears the entrenchment of pro-Turkish Syrian rebels in the country’s north. With pro-Syrian government forces sent to Afrin to confront the pro-Turkish offensive, the risk of outright Syrian-Turkish clashes is increasing.

RUSSIAN-IRANIAN SUSPICIONS

As for Moscow and Tehran, distrust still prevails— even though the two remain the Assad regime’s public backers, and have helped each other in that cause.

While Russian airstrikes have provided cover for regime forces and Hezbollah to retake previously held opposition areas, Russia could not have fired its cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea without Iranian consent. Equally, in August of 2016, Russia was temporarily allowed to fly sorties from the Iranian Nojeh airbase near Hamedan in western Iran to hit targets in eastern Syria. Russia and Iran have also formed an informal “4+1” platform with Iraq, Syria, and Hezbollah to exchange information.

Yet the two countries remain mutually suspicious of each other’s long-term motives. Russia might tolerate Hezbollah’s activities on the ground for tactical reasons, but Moscow does not want to be seen as a pro-Shia power and thus alienate the Middle East’s important Sunni actors, not least Saudi Arabia. That means Moscow is clearly apprehensive at the escalating rhetoric between Israel and Iran, and perturbed by the presence of Afghan Shia fighters on the Syrian-Iraqi border, where they operate under Iranian auspices.

What started as a civil war in 2011 has quickly morphed into a regional proxy war. But as Assad is regaining territorial and political control seven years later, new regional fronts have opened in Syria—none of which look likely to die down soon.

News in early February that Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, the two remaining alleged members of the so-called “Beatles” gang of British Islamic State (IS) jihadis, had been captured in Syria reportedly created a diplomatic dispute between the US and Britain. Neither country wanted to assume responsibility for their prosecution, like reported by theconversation.com.

It’s estimated that some 850 British citizens have travelled to fight in Syria and Iraq since the conflict there erupted in 2011. By early 2018, almost half of them had already returned. But what should be done with British fighters who wish to return to the UK after participating in the Syrian conflict?

Hardliners such as Britain’s defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, believethat Britons who fought for Islamic State abroad should be hunted down and killed to ensure they never return to the UK. His US counterpart, secretary of defense James Mattis, expressed similar views. In a special debate on returning British jihadis at the House of Commons in January, Conservative MP Bob Seely pointed out that it’s easier to kill a British jihadi in Syria than it is to arrest, turn or rehabilitate them.

It seems that, for a while at least, the US-led coalition against IS took this hardline approach. For example, the notorious executioner Mohammad Emwazi, also known as “Jihadi John”, was killed by a drone strike in November 2015. The British government estimates that 15% of those who had travelled to Syria and Iraq were killed during the conflict. But with the collapse of IS strongholds, the window of opportunity to use drones and other means to target Western militants who had joined the organisation is closing fast.

Because Britain is a signatory of the 1961 UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, the Home Office can only deprive a person of their British citizenship if they have dual citizenship. Such cases are rare.

Lessons from the International Brigades

Some historical lessons can be drawn from the way Britain and the US handled the return of their citizens who fought as part of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. In both countries, the government was deeply suspicious of the ideology that took these men and women to Spain.

Most of them were communists, members of a party that was perceived as being bent on revolution and overthrowing the governments in Britain and the US. Yet the British security services were sensible enough to understand that these volunteers were not a monolithic group. Some were not ardent ideologues, others had become disillusioned during the war in Spain. As a result, many veterans of the International Brigades were able to enlist in Britain’s armed services and take part in World War II.

In the US, the Office of Strategic Services enlisted veterans of the International Brigades to help train new recruits in guerrilla warfare. Part of the rationale behind the incorporation of these “reds” into the war effort was that it would be easier to keep an eye on them in the military than it would in civilian life.

A fine line

There are, of course, clear differences between the situation in Europe in 1939 and today. The risk that today’s returning fighters pose is very tangible. At least five of the men who carried out the attacks in the Bataclan theatre and elsewhere in Paris in November 2015 had been to Syria and joined the ranks of IS before returning to Europe. However, so far, those Britons who have returned from the conflict in Syria and Iraq have not been involved in terror attacks. Those men were radicalised in other ways. Not all foreign fighters become domestic terrorists and not all terrorists start off as foreign fighters.

Perhaps for that reason, not everyone in the security services or the government is convinced that those who return pose an immediate threat. MI5 director Andrew Parker said that those who have come back from Syria are subject to risk assessment. A minority were prosecuted in accordance with counter-terrorism legislation, but most weren’t and are, presumably, being monitored.

Historically, foreign war volunteers, whether in Spain or in other conflicts, have never been homogeneous in terms of their motivations, commitment and postwar trajectories. Today, a measured approach by the authorities is therefore more likely to help deradicalise those former supporters of IS who have become disillusioned with the cause. Where there is evidence that returning fighters were involved in carrying out crimes while in Syria or that they pose a clear security threat and intend to carry out terrorist attacks after their return, they should certainly be prosecuted. This is certainly the case for the alleged members of the “Beatles” gang.

However, in instances where the security forces don’t see an imminent threat, programmes that aim to reintegrate disillusioned jihadists into society may be more productive in the long run than a heavy-handed approach. This would not only help such individuals escape from a cycle of violence but could also serve as a counter-narrative to the one promoted by extremists.

For instance, there are organisations such as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that make use of networks of former extremists and survivors of violence in an attempt to deradicalise people who look as though they are beginning to drift towards dangerous organisations such as IS. This method does not replace law enforcement but could operate alongside it.