Oral evidence: UK military operations in Syria and Iraq, HC 657Thursday 17 March 2016
Oral evidence, 17 March 2016.
Witnesses
Michael Eisenstadt, Senior Fellow, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Charles Lister, Fellow, Middle East Institute, gave evidence.
Chair
We now move to the second panel. I am grateful to both gentlemen for their patience in waiting to begin. For the record, please make a brief opening statement identifying yourself and telling us a little about your background.
Charles Lister
My name is Charles Lister. I am a Fellow at the Middle East Institute, newly arrived here in Washington DC. I am also writing several long papers focused on Syria for the Brookings Institution. I am a senior consultant to the Shaikh Group’s two-and-a-half-year-long Syria Track II initiative. I have been meeting with the leaders of over 100 armed opposition groups from inside Syria—roughly every four to six weeks for the last two and a half years.
Michael Eisenstadt
I am Mike Eisenstadt. I am a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy where I direct our military and security studies programme. I have been at the institute for about 26 years or so. I worked in the US Government before that as a military analyst, and I served as an Army Reservist for 26 years, including stints in Iraq, the Palestinian areas, Turkey and the like.
Mrs Moon
Daesh’s progress in taking territory seems to have been slowed. Are we approaching an endgame in terms of their capacity to take new territory, and what would you say the impact of Russia’s decision to withdraw some of its personnel in Syria has had on the move towards a peace conference and a peaceful resolution of the war?
Michael Eisenstadt
To quote a great British statesman I would say we are at the end of the beginning, but it may be just the beginning of the end with Daesh. There is still a long way to go. We are seeing that, as US military officials will point out, they have not had a major success since the conquest of Ramadi in May last year. There has been a number of successes. Right now there is an offensive to extend from Ramadi to take over Hit. Baiji and Tikrit have been taken back, setting the scene for the battle of Mosul, which I do not expect to happen for quite some time. The bottom line is—I think it needs to be stressed—our strategy is contingent on the politics of our allies, and ultimately our ability to convert battlefield success to political accomplishments depends on our allies. Right now we have very limited leverage, and a change in their political culture is required: the end of the winner takes all, zero-sum game types of politics that we see in Iraq and in Syria, which brought them to this point. So on the most difficult piece, we are still a long way from battlefield victory. I do not think we have cleared Iraq of Daesh. I think we have pushed them underground and they will revert to an underground terrorist network like they were between 2011 and 2014. The Iraqi Government on its own has shown that it does not have the ability to deal with that kind of challenge. They will not go away. They will get pushed underground, and as long as they are in Syria they will have a base of support. I do not believe you can seal the borders completely. With regard to the Russians, it is important to note that the Russians left a lot of business unfinished: they did not encircle Aleppo; the opposition still has a foothold in Latakia province; Idlib is still largely in the hands of the opposition; and the Government still has a tenuous connection to Daraa. I think that was probably intentional. It gives them leverage over the Assad regime and over the international community to say, “We could go both ways”, “We could redeploy our forces.” It is an exemplary use of military power to achieve limited objectives that we should learn from, because I do not believe there is an endgame to this conflict that we are in right now that we could foresee: that if we do A, B and C we will achieve our objectives. So we have to husband our resources, but use them in a judicious way to advance our interests, and that is what the Russians have done. This is my last point, and then I will open it to Charles. Our President previously said, in order to justify non-intervention in Syria, that he could see no way that the use of military force can solve this problem. We should forget about solutionism. We are not going to solve these problems; we can manage them. At least now, that is the best we could hope for. We can manage them and advance our interests. Therefore, the limited use of force to advance our interests is the way we should think about our intervention there. So it has to be husbanded because we have other interests in other parts of the world, and any use of force would probably have limited benefits, but, if you do not visit the Middle East, it will visit you, so we have to be involved and engaged.
Charles Lister
I agree with basically everything that Mr Eisenstadt has already said. I think you are right to suggest that ISIS’s momentum has certainly slowed, if not stopped, certainly in the last month or two. However, we should not necessarily read that as ISIS being on its path to defeat. ISIS has demonstrated over almost the last 15 years a capacity to continually cycle through a process of very fast momentum, a pull back, and then to prepare for a new phase and adapt. Since 2003 ISIS’s adaptation to both internal and external threats has been impressive, to say the least, and that is something we should not forget. That being said, I think specifically in Iraq a corner has been turned. ISIS is certainly feeling under more pressure than it has done since its capture of Mosul in June 2014. The targeting, largely from the air, of ISIS’s financial resources seems to have had a significant impact on the organisation’s internal morale, and that, by extension, seems to have impacted on its ability to be on the offensive on the battlefield. These are things that we need to take advantage of but, crucially, as has already been said in this session and in the previous one, what about real victory against ISIS? In this I agree with Michael, we are not going to totally destroy ISIS—no one is. It is not going away. All we can do is revert them back to something that can be managed. None-the-less, getting ISIS to that point is entirely dependent on local allies—we cannot do it from the air and, arguably, we cannot do it ourselves by ourselves. In that respect, we are coming up with a significant shortfall in Syria and, certainly, we are now facing significant challenges politically in Iraq, which may impact that. With regards to Russia’s withdrawal from Syria and how that will impact the political process, I think the opposition has been quite encouraged at least—or it is encouraging to us. Statements coming out from the HNC opposition bloc in Geneva already suggest quite strongly that they see this as a positive step. Russia’s total withdrawal from Syria was one of seven demands that the opposition issued prior to the Geneva peace talks. But, fundamentally speaking, we need to see what this really represents. Putin has just given a speech to his armed forces newly returned from Syria this morning in which he has already indicated that all his anti-aircraft missile systems will remain in Syria for the long term, and that anti-terrorist operations in Syria will continue for as long as is necessary. And we all know what Russia’s definition of “anti-terrorism” means—it is something that is quite a lot broader than what we would agree with. So, fundamentally speaking, the dust is still in the air and we need to see what comes of this. The last point I will make on this, in terms of the trajectory of the withdrawal, is that, while Russia appears to have withdrawn a lot of its fast attack jets—at least half, I understand—what has newly arrived in Syria are a number of attack helicopters, models that have not previously been seen in the country. To someone like me, this suggests a strategic shift in terms of the kinds of operations that Russia sees itself fighting—perhaps more urban operations, with much closer air support, rather than high-altitude bombing. In that respect, if that proves true, we have not seen any change at all, and that certainly will not help the political process.
Mrs Moon
Our Prime Minister said that the head of the serpent that is Daesh was in Raqqa. Would you agree that ISIS is less of a serpent and more of a Hydra—that you take it from one place and it emerges later at a different point and with a different focus? Is that the risk that we are facing—we can remove them from one place, but they just emerge somewhere else?
Charles Lister
That goes to the point about adaptation that I was making earlier. If there is anything that ISIS has demonstrated a particular proficiency in, it is moving from front to front. What has been interesting in the last two to three months, particularly in northern Syria where the group is coming under continued pressure, primarily from Kurdish forces, is a relatively new tactic. In places like Kobani we might have seen ISIS fight to the death, literally throwing in hundreds upon hundreds of fighters, knowing that they will be killed in a battle that ISIS almost certainly would never have won, but what we have seen lately is a number of strategic withdrawals, presumably for the sake of saving fighters. That is certainly interesting with regards to the broader strategic situation. Raqqa, Mosul and Fallujah are three particularly significant areas for ISIS. If it comes under pressure in one, it will reinforce the other two—that is practised ISIS strategy. That is something that we need to be looking at in terms of syncing strategy in Iraq and Syria together. Unless we establish conditions on the ground whereby multiple significant targets can be attacked at the same time, ISIS will continue to be able to be, as you suggest, a kind of Hydra force that is always significantly strong in one area of strategic significance, even while taking losses elsewhere.
Michael Eisenstadt
I would like to build on that point; I will be very quick. This is part of their strategic art. They are low-tech, high-art in the way they wage warfare, in that when they suffered a reverse at Tikrit they then moved on Ramadi, and when they suffered reverses in Ramadi they then moved on Palmyra; I am not sure I have the chronology right. Then when they had problems in Syria—when they ran into the buzz saw in Iraq or Syria—they did overseas operations and tried to attract new adherents overseas, in order to create the image of momentum and that they are still gaining ground somewhere. That is really brilliant, and they have many options as a result because they are playing on a regional chess board. As a result, I agree that the flagship operation is in Syria and Iraq, but they are now setting up camp in Libya and have operations elsewhere, and then they have the overseas operation. They can use that to create the perception of momentum, because image and image management are key to their success.
Chair
In order to manage time best, would you mind if we took the next two questions together?
Mr Gray
What you described to us the other day as “jihadi whack-a-mole”, if that is the right expression, is a completely pointless thing to do. Your pragmatic “Let’s manage Daesh” approach, which incidentally is no doubt in Mr Eisenstadt’s paper, is quite different from what other people are saying and what our first witnesses this morning said. They said that the important thing is the caliphate, and if Daesh do not have land and territory, they are nothing and they are finished, so we must focus our attention on defeating them on the ground—we must take towns and cities and defeat them in a conventional military way. I hope I am not misinterpreting what you are saying in thinking that you would much rather see us destroying their ideology, their financing, their command and control, their spread around the world using electronic media, their terrorist approach in Europe and other things of that kind, rather than simply making a conventional military strike against them on the ground in Iraq or Syria.
Ruth Smeeth
I hope this is complementary to that question. Mr Lister, you talked about Daesh in terms of 2003. I would suggest that actually it was not Daesh then, but it has evolved and developed. Every time we beat an entity, the ideology is still thriving. Feeding on from James’s point, how are we now meant to challenge the ideology? We do it militarily—that is fine—but our counter-radicalisation strategy is miserable. Is that your perception?
Charles Lister
I will tackle the latter point before the first. Specifically with regards to the counter-narrative, I happen to take quite a sceptical view of this. When you talk about an organisation like ISIS and the kinds of recruits it seeks, by and large—of course, there are exceptions—we are not talking about the kind of people who will read a Western counter-narrative and be convinced. Perhaps my point was slightly unclear in my first comments. I absolutely advocate a strong military approach to fighting ISIS. The key is showing that ISIS is not invincible, and that it cannot claim to represent a caliphate. It can claim that it represents a caliphate as long as it wants if it only controls villages, but so far it has one of the biggest cities in Iraq, a major provincial capital in Syria and the vast majority of the eastern desert, the Sunni heartland in Syria. With that, it can claim to its supporters—of course, we can argue against it—to represent some kind of state structure. That is what we have to target in a military fashion. With regards to managing, what I meant was pushing it out of the major, strategically valuable urban heartlands, thereby taking away ISIS’s various claims to credibility both within its existing fighting force and with potential recruits. In that sense, that is where I see the current whack-a-mole strategy—that term has been frequently used—as far insufficient, precisely because it can show how successfully it can adapt. With regards to the adaptation point, strictly speaking, on paper, you are right: it was not the Islamic State in 2003, but it was exactly the same organisation. It has just steadily expanded by swallowing up various groups. It swallowed up various groups in 2006. You can—I have done; I wrote a long paper profiling the Islamic State—date it all the way back to Afghanistan in 1999 if you really want to. This is an organisation that has continued to grow, adapt and evolve in order to survive, and its particularly brutal strategy is what has allowed it to do that, by essentially out-competing its various rivals.
Mr Gray
Given that that is the case, are we really doing the right thing with a straightforward military approach in Iraq? That is what we did in Afghanistan, and it did not work there. Why should destroying them in Mosul—if indeed we could ever do that; we probably could not, but let us imagine we could—necessarily defeat Daesh?
Charles Lister
It has to be a sequenced and multi-aspect strategy, not just a military strategy. If we were talking about al-Qaeda in Syria, I would be saying a very different thing, but precisely because ISIS presents itself as a superior military force that vanquishes its enemies with extreme brutality, the only way of undermining that narrative—which, whether we like it or not, is extremely successful at recruiting people—is to fight it more successfully on the battlefield. But there needs to be a counter-narrative component, albeit one that we are facing significant difficulties with. We also need to empower a credible alternative. In this respect, in Iraq, we are going in the right direction but we are not really there—and in Syria, we are way off on the wrong track. We can probably get into that more in the discussion.
Michael Eisenstadt
I endorse what Charles just said. Early on, our counter-narrative efforts consisted of trying to get Muslim clerics to sign on paper saying how un-Islamic ISIL or Daesh was. The problem is that those clerics are, by and large, employees of the Arab state system that these people are trying to dismantle so are discredited clerics in their eyes. So those kinds of claim have no weight. Then people said, “Well, what we need to do is get drop-outs from ISIL to show how terrible ISIL is.” It is very easy to discredit those people as weaklings or shills for foreign intelligence services. You might be able to succeed around the edges, but ultimately, as Charles said, the most effective way to discredit them is to show that they are a failed god, to dismantle the caliphate and to defeat their army. If there is no caliphate, there is no lording over non-believers. There is no glory. There is no victory of their version of Islam. There are no sex slaves or spoils of war: all the reasons why people go over there to fight. That is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of victory—of defeating the ideology. I am doing a study on this. If you look at Nazi Germany after World War Two, you see that the defeat of Nazi Germany did not discredit Nazism. People said, “Well, we had some stupid leaders who made stupid mistakes,” but if you look at polling data through the ’50s and ’60s, it took a generation of change, social engineering, the rise of the left in Europe and Willy Brandt’s policies in the ’60s to finally bury the ideology and the fact that you had an occupation for several decades. Right now, Daesh is indoctrinating a new generation of young people. They are putting a lot of emphasis on that; that is a problem. We are forced by reality to adopt a strategy of strategic patience, but there will be a long-term cost, because there will be young people today who are indoctrinated in the ideology and will be true believers their whole lives. They may not act on their belief. In the long-term, there is a challenge to create frameworks where they are unable to act on their belief. After Nasserism lost its sheen in the Arab world, there were still lots of Nasserists, but there was no Nasserist state after Nasser’s death. That is what we have to realise: this is a long-term problem. You cannot defeat them by counter-narratives. You have to defeat them by creating an overwhelming reality problem—that their whole ideology flies in the face of the reality on the ground, which is that they are defeated.
Mr Gray
One final question. We destroyed communism without any form of military action; there were no battles at all. The iron curtain fell, and communism was destroyed. We didn’t attack Moscow. You indicated that we must attack Mosul in order to destroy Daesh.
Michael Eisenstadt
Because they are on the offensive now. They are an actor in the field and, at least until a year ago, they were on a roll. There are some people who say, “Contain them and let them collapse from within.” That is not an unreasonable proposition but I think that, given the fact that we have seen terrorist attacks sponsored by them already using their base of operations in Iraq and Syria, there is a price to be paid for that. It is quite possible, as Charles said, that they have gone through ups and downs, and right now they might be on the defensive, but there could be a geopolitical development somewhere or a revolution in Saudi Arabia. Who knows? I am not predicting that—I am not saying that that will happen—but that could suddenly make things look very different and reverse the tide. Keep in mind that twice the Assad regime had its back against the wall and then came back. We are seeing a constant reversal of fortunes. Therefore, when your enemy is on the ground, I say you keep kicking him. You do not say, “Leave him alone and he will die on his own” because he may not.
Mr Spellar
Your last comments rather remind me of the comment by Max Planck that scientists do not change their views but just die out, and that science advances one funeral at a time. Maybe we need to wait for that time. But in the meantime, we seem to have a military strategy, as you have outlined; it is, however, a lot less clear whether we have a political strategy. You talked about leverage, but even if we had leverage, do we have a strategy to try to leverage the regional powers and the regional forces towards it?
Michael Eisenstadt
This is an area where I do not think we have done particularly well in the past. The history of American policy towards the region is one of trying to tame rogue regimes, if you accept that term. In the ’80s, during the Iran-Iraq war, people were trying to engage Saddam Hussein in the hope that he would become tamed. He even talked about, “Well, if the PLO signs peace with Israel, I will accept that.” After the war, he reverted to form once the pressure was lifted. Likewise, with Arafat, there was the hope that he could become domesticated, but once he got his toehold in the Palestinian Territories, he kind of reverted to form. We saw that with al-Maliki when we were in Iraq and had 150,000 people on the ground. He needed us and was willing to sign on to things that, once our leverage finished, he reneged on. In that part of the world, they are there for the long game, and they live there; we are intermittent visitors and our attention waxes and wanes. When we really apply diplomacy and leverage, we can sometimes bend them to our will temporarily but, inevitably, we are going to leave, our attention will be diverted elsewhere and they will revert to form. This leads me to basically the conclusion of my own research. It might sound somewhat academic and I am trying to find a way to operationalise it policy-wise. It says that there is no avoiding a transformational agenda in our policy. I am not talking about democratisation. I am talking about something that is much more humble and limited but again, like I said, is about abandoning the zero-sum, winner-takes-all approach to politics towards a more inclusive approach. You have monarchies that are authoritarian regimes—there is no doubt about it—but that have a certain legitimacy because those kind of regimes fit in with the patrimonial political system of the region. There are diwans and there are ways that the leaders meet with their people so that the people feel that they have a voice. All I am saying is that we need to find a way to move the region forward. Otherwise, it will simply replicate its dysfunction, and that it what we are seeing now. I do not have the answer to that and I do not think that anybody has an answer. I will cease on this last point. Rory Stewart wrote a book in which he said that Westerners tend to focus on structures. We go over there and want to fix it. We create a constitution that is well balanced and well constructed, and create governmental structures and institutions, but we do not deal with the software—the political culture. I do not know how you do that. Wars transform political cultures and change peoples and nations. Maybe out of this, the trauma will change them, but I think that is a long shot. All I have seen thus far is the hardening of identities and lines in a way that it counterproductive from these kind of politics. I do not think we are there yet. I do not have an answer—I do not think anybody does—but I think it is the political culture more than the structures. You have to have, of course, conducive structures, but it is the political culture—the software—that we have to work on trying to fix.
Charles Lister
I agree very much with what Mr Eisenstadt has already said. With regards to leveraging regional forces, I think the biggest problem we have had in terms of using regional allies in the fight against ISIS is the fact that our regional allies have longer memories than we do with regards to why this problem has arisen and why it is so significant today. Having been living in the region for the last two and a half years, the reality of that is plain and simple, and there is no way of arguing against it: ISIS as it is today, the significant force it has represented since 2013-14, is there because of the Assad regime’s facilitation of jihadist militancy between Syria, Iraq and Lebanon since the late 1990s. It is unavoidably true: the scale of complicity the Assad regime has had in building al-Qaeda in Iraq, then the Islamic State in Iraq, then ISIS and now the Islamic State, first in fighting against the US-led occupation of Iraq. Arguably, hundreds of US soldiers would still be alive if this complicity had not happened. In the first 11 days after the US invasion of Iraq, as many as 6,000 Syrian jihadis were bussed in Government buses from Damascus and Aleppo into Iraq to fight the occupation. Although there was a decrease from that very significant scale at the very beginning, that complicity continued throughout the 2000s. The Assad regime’s complicity in allowing ISIS to fight the opposition in Syria by not fighting it in places like Raqqa is equally significant. We have to remember that this is how the region sees the fight against ISIS. Their argument is that you cannot fight against ISIS by ignoring the broader context. To them—I agree with this—ISIS will always be there if Assad or an equivalent of Assad is still in power; ISIS will still be there, as will al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, our strategy on fighting ISIS is either ignoring or has not realised that broader context. Until it does, as I say, we will be fighting against a significant organisation somewhere in Syria and Iraq for a very long time to come.
Michael Eisenstadt
Can I add something to that?
Chair
Very briefly, please.
Michael Eisenstadt
My argument for supporting the opposition in Syria since 2012 has been that we do not want Assad to go until we know what might take his place. Therefore, arming the opposition was an argument for testing the proposition of whether you can create a third way between the regime and the extremists that could govern in a responsible way and eventually perhaps overthrow the regime. But I do not think we want to go there until we know what we would get, based on our experiences in Iraq and elsewhere.
Chair
I want you to clarify that. You are saying you do not think we want to go there until we know what we would get if Assad disappeared.
Michael Eisenstadt
Yes.
Chair
This will lead into the Johnny Mercer’s question We discussed this with the earlier panel and Dr Kagan said—I am quoting as accurately as I can—that virtually all the opposition is Islamist at this point, but then he went on to explain the difference between hard-line Salafist Islamists and what we might call the Muslim Brotherhood style of Islamists. Would you broadly accept that something that conforms to that model would take over if Assad disappeared?
Michael Eisenstadt
At this time, yes. We have gotten to that state of affairs because we did not play a more active role earlier, trying to shape the complexion of the opposition. It may be too late for us to do that—I don’t know—but the proposition still needs to be tested. People migrated to groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIL because the Free Syrian Army was poorly resourced and a lot of them were not well vetted; they were involved in criminal activities. Maybe we can shape them in a direction where we can rebuild a centre. Maybe that is quixotic, maybe that is impossible at this point, but we need to test the proposition because it has gotten to where it is today in part because of our inaction, so maybe our actions can change it moving forward.
Chair
Charles, before you respond, Johnny’s question directly relates to this and to your list of organisations.
Johnny Mercer
In November, you identified 75,000 moderate fighters. What were the specific criteria that that was based around? How many do you think are still fighting?
Charles Lister
The vast majority of them are still fighting: 90% or 95%. I know that article got a lot of attention at the time for obvious reasons in the UK. The short length of that article did not allow me to give sufficient backing to what I was trying to say. The main background for why I make these claims is that I know all of the groups. With all due respect to much of the work done in Washington and elsewhere, I feel like an awful lot of the assessing of the opposition has been done using YouTube, Twitter, social media and from reading The New York Times. In my experience from knowing these groups and seeing them almost every month for the last two and a half years, nothing could be further from the truth than the way they have been described. It was good that the previous session qualified some of the claims that were made early on, which were fairly sweeping, and against which I would have taken a very hard argument. The claim that the vast majority of the opposition is political Islamist does not spell out, in truth. There is an extent to which, in my experience, we need to disconnect ourselves from being almost obsessed with Islam as a frame of reference for assessing people’s reliability. Someone can call themselves a Muslim and pray five times a day, but that doesn’t mean that he wants an Islamic state in Syria. That’s a vast generalisation, but it paints a picture of how I—at least someone who knows the opposition as I do—look at the way that many people are being measured. Specifically on your question, all of the groups that I listed in the table in that article, and many more, have committed both publicly and privately, in Track II work, for example, in front of international observers, to things like an outright rejection of any ethnic, sect or gender-based discrimination and a desire for full, representative Government. Almost all of them accept and want democracy. They certainly want friendly relationships with the entire international community. The vast majority of these groups are desperate for engagement with the West, and they feel like they have not been given that kind of acknowledgement. For obvious reasons, they want an end to dictatorship, a constant rotation of power, etc. Despite the fact that many of these individuals might appear Islamists to us sitting in London or Washington, you have to get behind the simple image to understand fundamentally what they want. What has been particularly interesting in the past few days—this was referenced in the previous session—is that in Idlib in north-western Syria there is a fairly significant number of armed groups in the Free Syrian Army that have been backed by the Central Intelligence Agency for two or two and a half years. One of those groups has very recently been targeted by al-Qaeda. Their headquarters in a big town called Maarrat al-Nu’man was taken over by Jabhat al-Nusra about four or five days ago. The first real evidence of the fact that the Syrian people and the vast majority of the opposition do not support that kind of al-Qaeda vision has finally been seen. You are now seeing women, children, men and other rebel groups protesting in the streets and flying the Free Syrian Army flag, which al-Qaeda thinks is tantamount to being an infidel. You have children taking over one of these retaken bases. There is now a small but growing popular uprising against al-Qaeda in Syria by the very forces that I mentioned in my article. I know that I’ve gone on for a long time. I will briefly conclude. The only reason why people have been able to use the argument, “You co-operate with al-Qaeda tactically on the battlefield; therefore you are tantamount to being an extremist,” is because no one has given them a sufficiently good, credible alternative. The amount of support they have received has not been enough to overpower the extremist alternatives that they have been forced to submit themselves to. It’s only been through this kind of pressure through a cessation of hostilities, whereby al-Qaeda can no longer prove itself as that dependable ally on the battlefield, that people have started to rise up. As complicated and as nuanced as it is, I would encourage you to see that there is a deep level of nuance here beyond what you see, beyond videos, beyond someone saying, “Allahu Akbar”, when they fire their gun. That does not mean they are an extremist. This is cultural, rather than religious. I can speak about this forever.
Chair
What I am going to ask you, Charles—because we’re not going to be able to go into it in depth today—is, is it possible to correspond with you on some of these points to go into it more deeply? I’ll just do a couple of the things that I have on a long list that I can’t ask today. First, you said you have dealings with all of these groups. Are you confident that, by naming the groups in the way that you have, you haven’t put into the public domain any information that would be damaging to the groups by, for example, identifying moderate groups to Assad? Is it not the case that Assad presumably knows all about these groups already?
Charles Lister
Yes—very much so. Assad knows about the groups, but obviously defines them in a very different way. Of course, Russia knows exactly the same and all the groups together know what each of them represents, who their respective external backers are and what their political positions are. Very briefly, on a Track II level, which, as I say, I have been doing for the past two and a half years, I have put together meetings of the leaders of 60 to 70 groups, together in one room for three days, and they all spell out their political vision in front of each other, so it is not a mystery.
Chair
Where do these meetings tend to take place?
Charles Lister
Turkey[1].
Chair
That is helpful to know. Sorry to cut you short, but I want to get through a few questions. The reason why I asked that question is that we have been struggling to get the British Government to identify their 70,000 of supposedly moderate groups. Are you satisfied that they are not talking about some other 70,000 people who are different from the 70,000 or 75,000 people you have identified.
Charles Lister
I have not seen their specific list—
Chair
They haven’t published it.
Charles Lister
My Track II work is funded, at least in part, by the Foreign Office, so we have British observers in all our meetings. Without having seen their list, I am aware that it corresponds very closely with what I came up with myself. I am also aware that in the United States my list comes close to their upper estimate of what they term here as moderate opposition. There is a strong basis for this, and of course it is based on people who regularly have face-to-face contact with these groups; it is not people who only sit in London or Washington.
Chair
I will not ask you to speculate why our Government will not publish the list. They say it would compromise their safety vis-à-vis Assad, whereas you are confident that it will not. I have just a couple more things to ask you briefly. First, it is generally estimated that there are 25,000 to 30,000 Daesh fighters in Syria. Here we have a list of 70,000 moderate fighters, plus, of course, the Kurds to be taken into account as well. Why is it that such a large number of supposedly moderate fighters do not seem to be able to cope with a much smaller number of Daesh fighters? Is it true that, although the people on your list to whom you refer as moderates are united in being opposed to Assad, they may not be so united in being opposed to Daesh or al-Qaeda?
Charles Lister
The very simple answer to your question is that they are all absolutely 100% united in forcing ISIS out of Syria. The problem is that for a significant majority of these groups, the primary priority—their primary day-to-day urgency—is protecting themselves against the regime and Russia, Hezbollah and the various Iranian-backed militias that are in Syria. There are some groups on that list, and others that I could name, who are fighting ISIS on a day-to-day basis, but that is because they are locally rooted in an area that has a front-line against ISIS. The primary reason why the CIA train and equip mission in Syria has succeeded is because they have accepted that Assad is a significant obstacle to the broader fight against terrorism. The CENTCOM or DoD-backed train and equip mission fundamentally failed because it ignored that reality. It asked civilians to ignore the regime in favour of, essentially, doing the West’s bidding in fighting against ISIS. If you look at the casualty numbers—I am pulling a number out of a rough estimate—ISIS might kill perhaps five Syrian civilians day-to-day. When the conflict is at its full intensity, the regime is killing as many as 100. How can we blame Syrians for prioritising their protective or defensive fight against the regime rather than fighting ISIS? We have to recognise that the two things feed off each other; they are not separate.
Chair
Just one more question with two parts to it. First, you mentioned numbers and gave some reasonably precise estimates of them. What are your sources? Is it just what the groups themselves declare their numbers to be? Is there any way you can check that they are not exaggerating? Secondly, you say that just because somebody prays five times a day that doesn’t mean to say they are hard-line Islamists, but one or two of these groups have titles that translate into things like “The Call of God”, or the “Islamic Union/Armies of Syria”, with sub-battalions entitled things like the “Battalions of the Beloved” and the “Battalions of the Companies of the Prophet”. A lot of comparisons have been drawn with the cold war and communism, and so on. There was a cold war saying that it if walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. These look like pretty duck-like Islamist titles to me. What do you say in response to that?
Charles Lister
I would say that it is not always to do with religion. Religion and culture are very closely in sync in the Middle East. The fact that these people have been under such severe brutality for the last five years has made people more personally religious—not politically, in all cases—than they might otherwise have been. Syria was a largely secular, very modern state, before this revolution; and the vast majority of these groups want to go back to that previous status quo ante. The use of Islamic terms came out in 2011 when there was no al-Qaeda, when there was no extremism. This was just their way of searching back into their old culture and to old, brave fighters from the region, who happened to be fighting at the time for Islam. These were just popular commanders who fought hundreds of years ago in the Middle East; so we shouldn’t generalise and say therefore they must laud this person as a representative of an Islamic state; because while there are, of course, exceptions to that—some of these groups are undoubtedly Muslim Brotherhood-oriented, for example—that does not have to mean they want an Islamic state. This is the kind of nuance I am trying to draw out here.
Chair
And the source of the numbers?
Charles Lister
Certainly not from the groups themselves. That is one aspect, but groups do, as you suggest, tend to exaggerate their own numbers. It is from a variety of things: my engagement with different Governments who work on this subject; my own personal assessments, according to where groups are fighting, how many fighters they are able to deploy to certain areas; and groups’ own assessments, etc. They are rough estimates; I am pretty keen on saying that, but they are, by and large, as far as I am concerned, relatively representative.
Michael Eisenstadt
Can I just add something quickly; I just want to say that we have to accept the possibility that, to some extent, identities are pliable. We saw in Iraq a lot of the people who were involved in al-Qaeda in Iraq were former Ba’athist Army officers. Now, you did have a process in the ’90s of greater religiosity in Iraqi society that was promoted by Saddam Hussein, but people go with the flow, and after the US invasion the most effective resistance was under the flag of Islam. Many people identified with these groups and transformed themselves into Islamists. I think we saw the same thing in Syria as well, that people who wanted to fight with the strong horse redefined themselves as Islamists. Those were the backers—the people were backing them because they were mujaheddin against the Assad regime; so they defined themselves as Islamist. So I think there is a certain degree of pliability here, in terms of identify. I just want to say as a last point—and I would defer to Charles, who has a lot more experience dealing with the opposition than I do—that my experience is that by and large the Islamist groups, not just in Syria but elsewhere, tend to have greater in-group solidary: asabiyyah, in Arabic. As a result they very often are able to outmanoeuvre their secular competition—I won’t use the term “secular”; it is not appropriate in this context. Their competitors may be Islamo-nationalist, or a softer kind of Islamic, with a small “i”, if you will. I will just say that in a power struggle I worry how moderate groups would stand up to groups like Jabhat al-Nusra if there was a political struggle in a kind of end-of-regime scenario; which is all the more reason why we have to support the people who—
Chair
So is it your collective position, then, that—I am trying to put this as objectively as I can—precisely because the hard-line Islamists might come out on top in a power struggle if Assad fell, is why it is so important to try and reach an agreement before Assad falls? Would that be a fair summary of what you are saying?
Michael Eisenstadt
What kind of agreement do you have in mind?
Chair
When you are talking about these negotiations—that they have all signed up to form an inclusive Government.
Michael Eisenstadt
More than agreement you need a kind of leadership, and I think this is one of the problems, in that a great deal of these groups are very fractured. Please correct me if I am wrong, but this is the curse of the Syrian opposition, by and large—factionalisation.
Chair
I was just trying to be clear. What are you saying that we need to try to achieve if we want Assad to go? If you are expressing concern, as you are, that in a shoot-out, as it were, between the hard-line Islamists and the more moderate groups, as you would define them, the hard-line Islamists might come out on top, what is it that you wish to achieve to prevent that dreadful outcome?
Michael Eisenstadt
Capable leaders with effective ability to govern in the areas that they have liberated, and for the people who we think share our vision to have more guns and more military capability than the others.
Chair
We are up against it, but I will try to squeeze in one or two quick questions.
Ruth Smeeth
This is a very quick one. I hate to turn this thing on its head but, given the size of the population, should we be surprised that only 75,000 people—as opposed to being amazed that it is as many as 75,000 people—are standing to fight against what is a death cult on one side and a horrible dictatorship on the other?
Charles Lister
Probably upwards of half a million people have been killed in the conflict so far, and a significant number of those have been opposition fighters. There are many more than 75,000, which is the number I would talk about as being potentially willing to abide by the kind of expectations that we would want for a future Syria. There are other groups who are further along the line of Islamic belief that would put that number up to over 100,000, and that is well before you get to al-Qaeda and ISIS. By and large, no. I think it is quite remarkable that so many people have kept up the fight, despite the sarin gas attacks in Damascus, the repeated barrel bombing and, as far as they are concerned, the abandonment, by and large, of their cause by the Western world. The stubbornness and determination to defeat a brutal, brutal dictatorship, which is complicit in almost every single war crime you can think of, is quite impressive. We need to try to stick by that kind of determination. No one can deny, myself included, that Islamists have become more powerful over time. A lot of that can be explained by psychological reasons, rather than necessarily the growth of al-Qaeda; it is natural that many groups end up going in that direction. There is a large number of distinctly moderate groups on the ground who need our support. The previous session specifically referenced Aleppo, and Aleppo city right now is defended solely by moderate opposition groups. A small number of Islamists are north of the city and south. If we are talking about the city itself, those are the guys who need our help. If we are talking about Idlib to the west, we are seeing, for the first time in five years, an uprising against al-Qaeda—the kind of uprising that I am talking about right now—in peaceful protest. These are the kinds of people who need our help. We ignore them at our peril, because that trajectory of Islamisation will continue and, before too long, it will be too late.
Mr Gray
Tell us in a nutshell, if you can in the time available, what Turkey’s role is in all this, or what it should be, perhaps linking to this the notion of some form of Kurdistan, as it were, after a post-Assad Syria?
Charles Lister
Turkey’s role in Syria has been problematic. It has chopped and changed its strategy from time to time. It is certainly accused of backing some of the wrong parties to the conflict over time, too. Certainly in the last month or so, what has arisen is Turkey’s quite legitimate national security concerns with regards to a Kurdish insurgency in the south-east of Turkey, which I understand may possibly have killed hundreds of their own soldiers in the last few months, albeit minimally reported. The Kurdish YPG, which has been our favoured partner in the north-east of Syria, is indisputably the Syrian wing of the PKK. Whatever other interpretation you might read, the YPG was established by Abdullah Öcalan’s brother—Abdullah Öcalan was a founding member, and is today the leader, of the PKK—and five famed PKK commanders. The PKK is seen, rightly or wrongly, as an existential threat to the Turkish state. Turkey has watched the Syrian wing of this existential threat receiving assistance, training and political backing from the West for the last 18 or 20 months, and it has created a very significant threat. Half of YPG casualties in the last 18 months were Turkish, so these are not all Syrians who are fighting for our cause against ISIS in Syria. In that respect, I fear that Turkey is being pushed into a corner whereby we could see, and have seen, lashing out. Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet because it felt like it was being pushed into a corner by the Russians. But this Kurdish issue is incredibly important. I fear, as a Syria analyst, that we may be watching a new political—not an ethnic—conflict now breaking out in northern Syria that could well outlast the conflict between the opposition and the regime. I cannot understate the hostility between the opposition and the Kurdish YPG, but I must underline that it is a political hostility, not an ethnic one. Vast numbers of Kurds and Christians, and even some Alawites, are fighting for the opposition in northern Syria, and I think that is often ignored. Most of the armed groups in Aleppo—opposition groups who are backed by the CIA—who are currently fighting the YPG have Kurds in their senior command. So it is important that this is not seen as an ethnic conflict; it is a political one about what is right for Syria’s political future.
Mrs Moon
I am very concerned that we are failing to give a coherent narrative to both our own populations and the people whom we are ostensibly working to support and assist. Someone once said that we should be clear about what we can do—it must be clarified what it will achieve—why it is needed and why now, why it will be helpful and who it will help. Are we failing to do that? In addition, Nixon said that when a great power fails to live up to its commitments, the greatness falls away. Are we at that point where we are falling behind Russia in demonstrating our willingness to meet our commitments?
Chair
We save the easy ones for the end, as you can see.
Michael Eisenstadt
Russia, with just 35 combat aircraft and a few thousand people on the ground not for offensive purposes, except maybe for some fire support—so with minimal resources—showed what you can do with the judicious application of military power coupled with diplomacy. This was in a way the mantra of this whole Administration, of smart diplomacy and coupling the two. I understand the current President’s desire not to be drawn back into this region, with talk of “quagmire” and the like, but the bottom line is not either going in all the way to solve the region’s problems, or doing nothing. We have vital interests that are being affected. As I said before, and as I often say, if you do not visit this part of the region it will visit you, because the Middle East is moving west. We thought a few decades ago that we could extend European and Western security frameworks to the region. Well, the region is now extending its insecurity to the West. We really need to be engaged and involved there, and you are right—in our country, we have a President who has only been dragged in incrementally, kicking and very reluctantly to a greater level of engagement than he would have liked, so he is not going to provide a vision for getting involved. To be honest with you, given my read of regional dynamics—that you have this kind of regional conflict system where you have a series of regional brush fires that are feeding each other—it is really hard to spell out. Americans like conflicts to be discrete, well defined, and with clear-cut endings and a victory parade, but you cannot promise any of this for these kinds of conflict. This is a long-term engagement with uncertain outcomes, but we have vital interests that require that we be engaged. It is a hard sell to make unless you do it in a way that involves, as I said, a light-footprint approach—a heavier footprint than this Administration is taking, but still a light-footprint approach. That would enable you to husband your resources, so that you do not have headlines every day about soldiers getting killed, and—this is the hardest part—to build up local capacity, as the people in the previous panel said. That is not easy, because we have just gone through this in Afghanistan and Iraq, with little to show for it. Actually, I have been writing about this. Part of the problem—the local politics part of it—is the way we go about it. We need to rethink the way we go about security systems and the like. There are other ways that we need to try. You always have choice, but I believe that we need to be committed to engaging in this region, otherwise we will continue to see the growth of radicalism and it will spread into our societies, as we are already seeing.
Chair
Before I give the very last word of the whole session to Charles, Phil, in 30 seconds, wishes to make one more point.
Phil Wilson
The Cold War lasted for 50 years. This war against Daesh and international terrorism is going to last. We have to get into a mindset that this is going to be a generational conflict. What more do you think the alliance could be doing, and Britain in particular, over the next few years to ensure that we see off Daesh? I don’t mean just in Syria, because if we sort it out in Syria and Iraq, it is going to end up somewhere else. What—in 30 seconds—do we need to be doing, as far as global governance is concerned, to ensure that it does not eventually go elsewhere?
Michael Eisenstadt
I will say two things and will not just focus on Britain per se. A lot of our European allies have not met their NATO spending commitment—is it 2% that they are supposed to meet? So a lot of our allies are not meeting their commitments there. A lot of our allies could be very useful—as Margaret Thatcher told Ronald Reagan, “Don’t go wobbly”, and sometimes we need to hear it from our friends. I suspect that they have been hearing it and just ignoring it, but we need to hear more often, “We need you in the game and we need to deal with this problem together, because we are in it together, whether we want to be or not.” That is all I would say.
Chair
Charles, before we create a diplomatic incident by being late for lunch with the ambassador, can I just thank you both and leave the floor to you to bring the session to a close?
Charles Lister
I will try to be as fast as I possibly can, despite the expansiveness of the questions. The short answer is yes, we are falling behind Russia. Russia has exploited a vacuum resulting from our lack of strategic thinking about how to tackle this problem. Certainly since ISIL took Mosul and declared its caliphate, our strategy has appeared to be constantly reactive. There certainly is a recognition—although this is whispered—that this is going to be, as Mr Wilson said, a generational struggle. It absolutely is; it will probably be longer than 50 years, but it might not only be against ISIS. It might be against al-Qaeda and another thing that comes after it. But fundamentally speaking, the biggest shortfall I see is that our strategy has been overly western-centric. This issue has its root in the Islamic world, and principally at the moment in the Middle East and north Africa. The Middle East and north Africa therefore have the solution. People on the ground in those countries have the solution, but whether it be meetings in the White House between executives of Google and Twitter about how to defeat ISIL’s narrative, or whether it be about our own, often misjudged, interpretations regarding opposition troops on the ground or ISIS itself, we need to accept and root our strategy more in what the region feels, because fundamentally speaking, as Michael said—and as many commentators have recently said—if we do not get this right, the problem will only continue to grow. That problem will not be growing necessarily in London or in Washington; it will be growing like a wildfire in the Middle East. So fundamentally speaking, we have to accept that the alternative lies in the region and that we cannot dictate what that alternative is going to be. In that respect, turning perhaps more to a UK or European frame of reference, the more security-oriented approach towards tackling returning foreign fighters or potential radicalisation cases in Europe—it is seen as a security-oriented approach, at least—only feeds a jihadist narrative. Their entire narrative is, “We are the victims. We are always being looked at as suspicious.” If we tackle those suspicious people solely through a security-oriented approach, we are literally gifting our enemies the kind of societal perceptions that they want to develop. Certainly after the Paris attack, France has gone very much in that direction. You can read ISIS propaganda celebrating the fact that societies are divided and that Muslims are not allowed to appear here covered or there doing something else. We need to encourage an open debate. In universities in the UK, there have been a number of incidents lately whereby potential examples of a healthy debate have been suppressed, whether by student groups or the universities themselves. That also needs to be something that we acknowledge. A healthy debate, including with controversial people, is precisely the way to undermine this ideology, and not suppressing that.
Chair
Thank you both very much indeed. The session has ended. We are very grateful to the members of both panels for a mass of interesting argument and information. Oral evidence: UK military operations in Syria and Iraq, HC 657 28 [1] Note by witness: Meetings containing only armed opposition groups take place in Turkey. However, meetings that include armed group leaderships, but also comprise senior representatives of minority communities, tribal leaderships, the business community, academia, civil society, women etc., have taken place in Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.