MESOP TODAYS COMMENTARY US Continues to Fail to Show Strategic Leadership in Fight Against ISIS / By Biza Barzo

Almost simultaneous terrorist attacks in France, Kuwait and Tunisia on June 26th killed dozens of people, barely 24 hours after massacres in and around Kobani. ISIS attacks against Kurds in and near Kobani served both tactical and propaganda goals. The Kurds, however, have by now become the most effective fighting force against the Islamic State, with Kobani becoming the site of the first major defeat for ISIS after a lengthy siege in which Kurdish forces ultimately beat back and repelled them.

Kurdish forces have so far been the only force on the ground demonstrating a will to fight that matches the Islamic State’s. They have defended Yazidis and Christians, as well as Arab Sunnis, who all together make up the bulk of nearly two million displaced persons taking shelter in autonomous Kurdistan. But perhaps what most reveals commitment by the Kurdish Peshmerga is how they hold the line with so little material assistance on the one hand, while on the other hand being surrounded by a number of ineffective passive actors, among them the Iraqi army which lacks the will to fight and has on several occasions run away from the battlefield and left the fight to the Peshmerga. We also have Turkey, which not only suppressed the Kurds for a long period of time but has also turned a blind eye to the Islamic State, not even considering it as a threat but instead only adding to the struggle faced by Kurdish forces. During a recent speech, which The Daily Beast reported, Erdogan vowed not to accept a move by Syrian Kurds to set up their own state, and the Turkish president was planning to invade Syria, to stop the Kurds and not ISIS: which basically sums up Turkey’s priorities at this time.

Massive amounts of weapons have been bought by a number of European countries to arm the Kurds, but American commanders, who are overseeing all military operations against ISIS, are blocking the arms transfers and demanding the weapons to be channelled through Baghdad.One of the core complaints of the Kurds is that, while the Iraqi army has abandoned so many weapons in the face of ISIS attack, the Peshmerga are fighting modern weaponry with out-of-date equipment. The US has been aiding the forces on the ground fighting ISIS for some time, but their choices of the forces to support and the mechanisms to deliver support are questionable. As disputes between the KRG and the Central government in Iraq have been ever ongoing, the Iraqi government has continuously let its well-trained military run away from the battle field and left the fight to the unexperienced and not well-equipped Peshmerga, while also sending only a very small portion of the weapons received from the US to the Peshmerga.

The US refuses to directly arm the Peshmerga, who have in fact been the only major force on the ground fulfilling the supposed US objective of defeating ISIS without a repetition of an Iraq war or having a massive number of American soldiers killed.

An alternative solution, the crucial need for the right serious partners in the region to defeat the Islamic State, and the lack of will and commitment by the Iraqi army are issues that have been considered repeatedly by the Obama administration and most recently by the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee member, Chris Murphy. Another question comes up here: isn’t directly arming the Peshmerga and other Sunni forces in the region, or developing a secure efficient mechanism for sufficient weapons to be delivered directly and separately to the different forces on the ground, including the Peshmerga, without having to going through the corrupt Iraqi central government, an alternative solution?

The arguments that come up in response are that the US hesitates to directly arm the Kurds for reasons such as the isolationist approach of the Obama administration, the threat to the “unity of Iraq” – as if there is any to begin with – and the threat to the US partnership with Turkey. Then the question becomes one about the priorities of US foreign policy in the Middle East; do the policies of the US need to be black or white, or can there be a middle ground in having neither intervention nor isolationism? Since the US continuously stresses the importance of supporting the right partners in the region, perhaps the time has come to determine who the true right partners are – the corrupt central government which has declared that it does not want US help in any way and is basically a satellite of Iran, or the Kurds, who have actually made significant efforts towards defeating ISIS on behalf of the rest of the world, and have proved themselves to be reliable US boots on the ground against the extremists? Is it the right call for the US to take into consideration Turkey over and above Kurdish forces at this critical point when ISIS has demonstrated again its interest in expansion and recapturing territories, especially the strategic city of Kobane which ISIS re-entered five months after it was secured by Kurdish forces, causing a large number of casualties; while Turkey, in many respects, fears Kurdish forces and Kurdish independence more than it fears ISIS.

The United States appeasing a Turkish state which supports Jihadists will only result eventually in more chaos in the region; and their support for the Iraqi government will only result in the strengthening of Iran as a regional power and will not benefit the fight against terrorism. An efficient and rational alternative solution is to develop a mechanism to separately arm the different Kurdish and Sunni forces on the ground in order, first, to eliminate the power of the Islamic State and, second, to prevent interdependent relations and domestic disputes among the different groups that could lead them to a defeat. The US needs to more deeply consider the interests of the groups they are arming on the ground. Ultimately, ISIS will continue to perpetrate the kind of horrors we have seen in recent weeks because it sees potential propaganda and strategic gains.

Biza Barzo is an International Studies student and a researcher based in Kurdistan and currently in the US researching about US foreign policy in the Middle East with a main focus on the KRG