ISIL in 2016
Iconoclasts is set in the Middle East, in the midst of
the Syrian civil war. It deals with the so-called Islamic
State declared in 2014 by the regional terrorist group
known to the U.S. as the Islamic State in Iraq and the
Levant (ISIL). Formerly known as the Islamic State
in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), ISIL had conquered an area
between Raqqua, Syria and Mosul, Iraq, and declared
themselves to be a worldwide caliphate. The Islamic
State created its own military, courts, currency, and
passports, and enforced a particularly brutal interpretation
of the Quran, the holy book of Islam.
ISIL’s origins can be found in the U.S. overthrow
of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party government in Iraq
in 2003. Part of the U.S. occupation included a program
to remove all Ba’ath Party members from government
service. Iraq’s Ba’ath Party began in a kind
of fascistic pan-Arabism, but by the time of Saddam
Hussein, it was merely a bureaucratic tool to enforce
the rule of Hussein’s Al-Tikriti clan. When all those
Ba’athist bureaucrats and military officers were forced
from their jobs, many joined resistance cells fighting
the U.S. occupation. Most were Sunni Muslims, a
religious minority in Iraq.

In 2007 the U.S. instigated a “troop surge” in Iraq
combined with attempts to buy the temporary loyalty
of Sunni Arab tribal leaders. The result was that most
of the Ba’athist-inspired resistance groups were run
out of Iraq by March 2011. Many took shelter in
neighboring Syria, a state that shared a Ba’ath Party
political culture. Syria’s Ba’athist party was a lethal
rival to Iraq’s Ba’ath Party, and Syria supported the
U.S. invasion. But Syria had then done much to help
the resistance against U.S. forces in Iraq, despite Iraqi
Ba’athists being Sunni and Syrian Ba’athists being
Alawite, a sect of Shia Islam. Just as Iraq was winding
down, Syria was gearing up.
In March 2011, the Syrian government met civil
protests of the Arab Spring with lethal force. Rather
than cowing the population, it ignited a full-scale
rebellion. Former Sunni Ba’athist insurgents from Iraq
made common cause with Sunni rebels in Syria and
formed the movement that would become ISIL. The
rebellion bloomed into a sectarian civil war.
In Iraq, Sunni insurgents had been fighting against
a majority Shia population. In Syria, the majority was
Sunni and the ruling minority were Shia. ISIL quickly
drew thousands of recruits by demonstrating that
they were the most energetic and effective insurgents
against the Syrian Ba’athist Shia government. ISIL
took control of entire cities and set up their capital in
Raqqa, Syria.

In 2014, ISIL pulled off its greatest coup. Fifteen
hundred fighters crossed the border back into Iraq
and routed over 60,000 troops stationed in Mosul,
a Sunni-majority city that had been chafing against
rule of the Shia-led government in Baghdad. Mosul is
Iraq’s second largest city. Including areas in both Syria
and Iraq, ISIL brought between three and eight million
people under its rule.

The U.S. responded to ISIL’s success with Operation
INHERENT RESOLVE in Iraq, Libya, and
Syria. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) deployed
special operations forces with Kurdish and Iraqi units
and supported ground operations with airstrikes.

In 2015, the future viability of the governments
of Syria and Iraq appeared to be in doubt. Then the
Peshmerga, the army of Iraqi Kurdistan, launched an
offensive to reclaim villages around Mosul with U.S.
air support. By 2016, both states, with massive aid
from Iran, Russia, and the United States, are beginning
to push back.

The next stage begins with Al-Fatah or Operation
CONQUEST, an offensive by Iraqi Kurdistan, the
Iraqi government, Shia, Sunni, Christian, Yazidi, Turcoman,
and Armenian militias with U.S. and UK air
support and ground forces.
The days of ISIL are numbered.