On August 3, 2021, the US military released a quarterly report on ISIS directed to Congress where it stated that the group is a “low-level” threat but cautioned that it could remain active “indefinitely” in remote areas of Syria.
Dave DeCamp of Antiwar.com wrote that “The US presence in Iraq and Syria is under the umbrella of the US-led anti-ISIS coalitions.”
He added that “Washington does not want to give up its occupation of either country, so even though ISIS no longer holds significant territory, the US military has an interest in inflating the threat from the group.”
“Coalition partners in Iraq and Syria continued to rely on Coalition support to conduct operations, and ISIS remained entrenched as a low-level insurgency,” the Pentagon’s inspector general declared in an introduction to the report.
In the report, US Central Command believes ISIS “likely has sufficient manpower and resources to operate indefinitely at its present level in the Syrian desert.”
At the moment, the US has roughly 900 troops in northeast Syria. DeCamp knows the score about the US’s presence in Syria:
The US has about 900 troops in northeast Syria. On paper, the US mission is to help the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces fight ISIS. But the occupation is also part of Washington’s economic warfare against the government in Damascus. On top of crippling sanctions, the region of Syria where US troops are deployed is where most of the country’s oil fields are, keeping the vital resource out of the hands of Damascus.
The Biden administration made a recent announcement about its decision to conclude the US’s “combat” mission in Iraq by the end of 2021. However, DeCamp noted that the US “will keep troops in the country under an advisory role.” At the moment, there are roughly about 2,500 American troops in Iraq, and it has yet to be determined how many troops will actually be pulled out once the American military mission change goes into effect.
Currently, the US government aids the Iraqi government fighting ISIS, but it also takes advantage of this situation to bomb Shia militias, which are suspected of being Iranian proxies. The funny part is that to defeat ISIS the US would have to hold its nose and team up with Iran and its proxies. The two sects obviously hate each other, and realism would dictate that the US not try to destroy Shia militias if it’s goal is to stick it to ISIS. Similarly, the US should also pass the buck to Russia in Syria, which is also fighting ISIS. Russia’s previous scuffles with Sunni extremists in the Caucasus region makes it a logical strategic partner in the campaign against ISIS.
There will always be perpetual threats if neoconservatives/neoliberals are always in charge of foreign policy. The US government’s interventions create massive power vacuums where nefarious actors emerge to fill them and create more problems.
This is a played out feature of American foreign policy, wherein the US government intervenes in one state, thereby completely destabilizing it. As a consequence of the instability, new actors — who are quite nasty — enter the fold and start wreaking havoc. ISIS is the perfect example in this case.
On a related note, there are also rumors as well that ISIS’s formation has the fingerprints of certain intelligence agencies such as the Israeli Mossad involved in it. Israel is notorious for already providing aid to several of the rebel groups in the Syrian Civil War that have strong connections to radical Sunni organizations. This may sound wacky to the uninitiated, however, it does make sense for Israel to prop up Sunni extremist groups like ISIS simply for the fact that they will clash with Iran, a Shiite state.
A scenario where both Iran and ISIS bleed themselves out is one that the Israelis would desire knowing full well that extremists in both Islamist sects would be weakened due to the internecine conflict. In fact, Efraim Inbar, an Israeli scholar at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, believes that ISIS could serve a “strategic purpose” for the West and advocates ISIS to stay somewhat intact.
Heck, Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States described ISIS as “the lesser of two evils” when compared to Iranian-affiliated proxy groups in the Levant. Sure, Iran is Israel’s biggest threat. But guess what? Iran poses no threat to the US. It’s simply too far and has no way to challenge the US in a conventional military conflict.
Let’s face it, the Middle East is perennially unstable and will continue to be so regardless of what the US does or doesn’t do. Israel is a high-tech nation with a powerful military who now has new partners thanks to the Abraham Accords. They can band together to stabilize the region while the US pulls out. At the end of the day, the US should have never been in the Middle East in the first place.
Any concerns about ISIS and other extremists groups — who ironically emerge as a result of US interventions— are just excuses for the US to maintain a permanent presence abroad in a region that has zero strategic interest for it. I don’t know about you, but it would probably be more valuable to have those troops at the US border instead.
