The battle against Daesh is a war that no one will win.
Here the real battle that should concern us and that we must fight. All eyes are on the battle for Mosul.
Is the coalition will defeat the Islamic State or not? In the end, it will not matter.
If we have learned anything in the last 14 years of "war on terror" in Iraq it is that the hard-won victories today can quickly become tomorrow's disaster epics.
We're in favor or against war, the facts speak for themselves: the overthrow of Sadam Husein created a vacuum covered by extremists of al Qaeda who previously had no presence in Iraq and that quickly transformed and expanded in apocalyptic force known as Daesh.
But the very nature of the battle of Mosul is one of the many signs reveal that the Middle East as we knew it no longer exists and will never return. The region is deeply mired in the throes of an irreversible transition to a new geopolitical instability disorder.
Before 11-S several neocon strategists thought their role was to order the imperial power of the United States to accelerate the disintegration of the Middle East. Actually, the Middle East we knew is disintegrating under the pressure of deeper and slow biophysical processes: environmental, energetic, economic.
These processes are undermining the power of regional states quietly.
As states become weaker and unable to cope with the essential environmental, energy and economic challenges, they will cover the gap extremists.
But step up the fight against extremists does not mean that you are facing these deeper issues.
On the contrary, it is producing more extreme.
The war in Mosul is no exception.
Fallujah to Mosul
"It Fallujah on a larger scale," said Ross Caputi, a former US Marine who participated in the second siege of Fallujah in November 2004.
"I've heard terrible stories about civilian casualties leaving Mosul; a friend who worked in humanitarian assistance trying to recruit volunteers to work in a medical surgical unit in Erbil, where much of the most serious cases are redirected. it was she who told me that the situation is worse than it is told in the media. "
Caputi concerns are corroborated by the findings of AirWars, whose report victims February documented that the US -led coalition air strikes are killing more civilians even than Russia.
In the first week of March, the group found that between 250 and 370 civilians were killed by coalition forces led by the United States who raided western Mosul , a figure exponentially higher than the number of civilians killed by bombing since November 2016.
Although the Russians have caused more fatalities, Airwars notes that the operations of the Iraqi government to recover eastern Mosul control Daesh "represented a high cost for non-combatants caught in the city."
The war in Mosul is the culmination of a longer sectarian war that precedes the onset of Daesh.
The Iraqi government backed by US sidelined since the beginning [of the occupation] the Sunni minority.
As the Sunni insurgency against the occupation intensified, US and Iraqi officials painted him as something more than an uprising of fanatical extremists. Actually, it was the occupation itself which radicalized the insurgency and al Qaeda placed at its apex.
Caputi witnessed when he was a soldier in Fallujah in 2004 that the insurgency was not dominated by al Qaeda.
Instead, he said, under the pretext of attacking al Qaeda insurgents, the US military attacked and killed mostly Iraqi civilians.
Describes a striking example: when doctors at the main hospital of the city announced that US bombing had caused significant civilian casualties, the US military officially considered as "personal terrorist support" and at the same hospital as "little more than a hotbed of insurgent propagandists "because" they had used their infrastructure to issue claims of civilian casualties nonexistent. "
In the end, US troops took control of the main hospital on the eve of the US attack on Fallujah. This recalls Caputi, was considered a success of the "information operations" Americans.
The destruction of Fallujah by the US military's role Iraqi Shiite sectarian and central government, which described the predominantly Sunni city as a hotbed of extremist added.
Fallujah war never ended.
Armed US-Iraqi forces attacked and bombed the city intermittently almost daily since 2012. These operations intensified after the city was captured by Daesh in January 2014.
In this period, Bashar al - Assad of Syria allowed fighters of al Qaeda freely moved across the border to increase the Iraqi insurgency against US forces.
This policy, which continued until 2012 , contributed to the destabilization of Iraq.
But al Qaeda would not have been able to strengthen this foothold in the country if it were not for the deeply sectarian violence practiced by the US military and the Iraqi government against the Sunni minority, as was exemplified in Fallujah , which led some to Daesh accept as a "lesser evil" and others radicalized enough to join the movement.
The warning
US officials were warned of this outcome since the beginning of the occupation.
However, they and their Iraqi counterparts have learned little in recent history.
According to Anne Speckhard , director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism and Pentagon consultant who designed the psychological and religious sections of the program of rehabilitation of detainees in Iraq , terrorists recruited and trained prisoners in the camp Bucca.
United States began to intervene but the rehabilitation program that was designed to de-radicalise never really applied. Among the prisoners was the founder and leader of Daesh, Abu Bakr al - Baghdadi.
Daesh other senior commanders were also jailed in the prison: Abu Ayman al - Iraqi, Abu Abdulrahman al Bilawi, Abu Muslim al Jarasani, Fadel al Hayali, Mohamad al - Iraqi, Mohamad Abd al Aziz al Shammari and Khalid al -Samarrai.
However, the military coups that had led to the Baghdadi and others to the detention camp Bucca were indiscriminate, were part of a invasion and occupation attacking Iraqi civilians Wholesale and were directed disproportionately against Sunnis.
According to Speckhard, internal estimates of US authorities in late 2006 confirmed that only 15% of detainees at Camp Bucca were "real extremists adhering to the ideology of al Qaeda."
When Speckhard interviewed former prisoners of Camp Bucca in Jordan in 2008 , he found that US officials had never applied irrefutably e l detainees rehabilitation program.
Former prisoners informed him that the Imams, carefully selected by the authorities, remained outside the fence of the prison, reading Islamic verses while detainees were laughing and spitting them.
"This was not what I proposed , " he said.
Speckhard said that was not reported many of the abuses at Camp Bucca.
"The prisoners told me they were tortured by the Iraqis and they were happy to have fallen into our hands instead."
Anecdotal evidence suggests that hers as Camp Bucca was under the tutelage of the United States 24,000 prisoners mostly Sunni and it was there that the systematic abuse and brutal torture caused deaths.
A classified report from the US Army in 2004 and published by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2006, documented the existence of 62 separate into allegations of prisoner abuse investigations in US detention centers throughout Iraq, Camp Bucca included .
Difficulty reading the list of abuses that would have caused Saddam to be proud: physical and sexual assault, mock executions, death threats to an Iraqi child to "send a message to other Iraqis," stripping detainees, throwing stones at Iraqi children handcuffed detainees drown with knots of their scarves and interrogating them at gunpoint.
But there were deeper issues at stake.
Major General Douglas Stone, then commanding general of the Task Force Detainees began
to allow "rapid release of detainees through a four - day program that basically checked many boxes and meant them only superficially, if he did."
"Maybe that program was good for the 85% who did not sympathize with the ideology of militant jihadism" . But it did not cause any effect where interested.
MEE contacted the General Stone to ask for an assessment but had received no reply at the time of publishing these lines.
At that time, recalls Speckhard, warned the General that rehabilitation Stone " will only work if Iraq's political support. A man who has joined the militant jihadism that killed her sister may agree to renounce violence, but after his brother will kill again head to it. "
Divide and conquer
"Mass releases were carried out to satisfy Sunni tribes" he says.
"We would release detainees into supporting [the initiative of the militias] Awakening, aimed at organizing the Sunni insurgency against al Qaeda."
But the US military did not decide en masse to release these prisoners kindness.
There was a dubious and dangerous strategic context:
[Militias] Awakening was an initiative led by the United States to mobilize Sunni tribal leaders against al Qaeda in Iraq.
It was believed that the widespread release of Iraqi detainees would help build trust between the Sunni tribes about US intentions, and would bring fighters.
But US intelligence agencies also knew that many of those who went to fight al Qaeda in Iraq within the framework of the Awakening initiative were in many cases of al Qaeda sympathizers.
classic counterinsurgency strategy practiced: try to break the resistance back to sections of it against itself.
As I reported earlier in MEE, the elements of the strategy are described quite frankly in an insightful report from the RAND Corporation commissioned by the Center Capabilities Integration Training and Indoctrination US Army, published in 2008.
What no such information is emphasized in the report of the RAND explicitly recognized that its strategic proposal "divide and rule" to exploit the Sunni-Shiite sectarian tension throughout the region applied after US forces in Iraq. Thus, the report notes that US forces should use covert strategies to sow "jihadist divisions in the field. Today, that strategy is being used in Iraq at the tactical level. "
The report explained what it meant exactly that in Iraq: America was forming "temporary alliances" with "nationalist insurgent groups" affiliated with al Qaeda Sunni who had fought against the United States for four years providing "weapons and cash".
While these nationalists "have cooperated with al-Qaeda against US forces" in the past they were now being supported to exploit "the common threat that al Qaeda poses to both parties."
The idea was to split the insurgency from within by co - opting its broader base of support among the Sunni population. It sounds clever in theory, but in practice we now know that the strategy sowed the seeds of the birth of Daesh.
But Americans got into that garden all by themselves.
While channeling their support for a whole range of disaffected Sunni jihadists with several past affiliations to al-Qaeda, theUnited States supported the same time the central government Shiite Iraq. Both sides were supported by the US and increased sectarian tensions.
And the Iraqi government, in particular, showed a progressively brutal contempt for the Sunni minority. In this context, the US strategy was doomed from the start.
"Since retiring from Iraq , the anti - Sunni sectarian bias Iraqi government under then Prime Minister was exacerbated Nuri al - Maliki and forces emboldened Shiite security" says Speckard.
Under al - Maliki , the Iraqi authorities even profiled and arrested the main Sunni politicians , reinforcing prejudices within the Sunni tribes and increased the rate of sectarian resentment that led to a minority of Sunnis to support Daesh.
Of course, the sectarian violence of the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi , the former leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, compounded this problem. "
The following insurgency
While the atrocities of Daesh in Fallujah, Mosul and beyond, have undermined its traction among local Sunnis, the atrocities of anti-Daesh coalition backed by the United States are alienating the long - term population.
"Overall, I do not think that people in Mosul see the coalition as anti-Daesh heroic saviors, but I think they have changed their assessment that Daesh is the lesser evil , " said Ross Caputi.
"The past year both Fallujah and Mosul, the anti-Daesh forces kept these cities under siege , while Daesh prevented people escape and caught everyone as human shields.
Therefore the food prices soared and people began to starve.
The NGO for which he worked could introduce some food in Mosul, and we saw no feeling of support Daesh ".
In early 2014, minority sectors Daesh tolerated as a marginal part of a diverse uprising against the central government backed by the United States. Daesh crimes changed that perception. So the coalition could succeed and end the chain of command of the terrorist group remaining in Iraq. But it will mean the end of the war?
A senior Kurdish intelligence doubt.
Lahur Talabany, a senior counterterrorism official in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), believes that although Daesh is defeated in Mosul, the group will continue and escalate their insurgency by mountains and deserts.
"Mosul will recover ... I think what we have to worry about is asymmetric warfare," he says.
Although Daesh be dissolved, another extremist group will likely emerge in place if nothing is done to solve the deep sectarian tensions in Iraq.
"It may not be Daesh, but another group will emerge under a different name, a different scale, we must be very careful," warned Talabany Reuters. "These next few years will be very difficult for us politically ...
We know some of these guys have fled. They are sending people to the next phase post-Mosul, hidden cells and sleepers.
We must try to find them when they go underground, try to eliminate these dormant cells, certainly there will be unrest in this region over the coming years. "
Caputi agrees that a "victory" in Mosul could be the beginning of a protracted conflict, but is skeptical about the "sleeper cells".
If the strategy is to kill each of the last members of Daesh, fail, warns. And that's why the current operation will not end the war because it is no longer about the conditions originally created by Daesh.
"These operations are creating the context for long-term insurgency against the Iraqi government and against Iranian influence across the region," Caputi told me. "
Daesh phenomenon is the product of several historical, social and political conditions which transform this war has not helped at all, since those conditions are still there: injustice, poverty, political repression. I move that we will see continuing Sunni insurgency ... Iraqis will remain second - class citizens under this government and not tolerated. "
System failure
Meanwhile, the conditions that set the stage for the emergence of Daesh are worsening.
I mean surface geopolitical conditions: the destruction of Iraqi society during decades of war and occupation; the collapse of Syria in the internecine war due to the total destruction of civilian infrastructure by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the atrocities of extremists who gradually have been doing with the rebel movement supported by the Gulf States and Turkey.
But there are fundamental biophysical processes developed throughout the region that are accelerating the conflict in depth.
I have studied these processes and published my conclusions about them in a new scientific monograph: Failing States: colapsing Systems: Biophysical Triggers of Political Violence, published by SpringerBriefs in Energy.
One of my conclusions is that Daesh born in the crucible of a long process of ecological crisis. Iraq and Syria are increasingly experiencing water shortages.
A number of scientific studies have shown that a cycle of drought in a decade in Syria, dramatically intensified by climate change, caused thousands of Sunni southern farmers lost their livelihoods as malograban crops. They moved to coastal cities and the capital dominated by the Alawite clan of Asad.
Meanwhile, Syrian state revenues were in terminal decline because production of conventional oil in the country peaked in 1996.
Net oil exports gradually decreased, and with them also decreased capacity Syrian finance.
In the years before the uprising of 2011, Asad reduced domestic subsidies for food and fuel.
While Iraqi oil production has better prospects, since 2001 production levels have remained well below the projections of lower rank in the industry, mainly because of geopolitical and economic complications. This has weakened its economic growth and, consequently, the state's ability to meet the needs of ordinary Iraqis.
Drought conditions in Iraq and Sir ia exacerbating have intensified agricultural failures and eroding the living standards of farmers.
Sectarian tensions have been exacerbated.
Internationally, a series of climatic disasters in major food-producing regions has fueled the increase in world prices.
The combination has become economically intolerable life for large groups of Iraqi and Syrian population.
External sources - the US, Russia, the Gulf countries, Turkey and Iran - saw the escalation of the Syrian crisis as a potential opportunity for themselves.
The interference of these powers has radicalized the conflict, has kidnapped Sunni and Shiite groups on the ground and has accelerated the de facto collapse of the Syrian we knew.
At the same time, drought conditions have also worsened through the porous Iraqi border.
As I write in Failing States, Collapsing Systems, there has been a striking correlation between the rapid territorial expansion of Daesh and worsening local conditions as a result of drought.
These extreme conditions and water scarcity will intensify in the coming years.
The discernible pattern here is based on my model biophysical processes generate, environmental, energy interconnected economic and food crises, what I call interruption system of the earth (ESD acronym).
ESD, in turn, undermines the capacity of regional states like Iraq and Syria to procure goods and basic services to their populations.I call this process destabilization of the human system (HSD in English).
While states like Iraq and Syria begin to fail as the destabilization of the human system is accelerated, who act-whether the Iraqi and Syrian governments, foreign powers, militant groups or civil society actors not just understand that bankruptcies statewide infrastructure and drive them deeper systemic processes ESD.
the focus is always on the symptom and that is why the reaction almost always fails completely even as the starting point for addressing the crisis.
Thus, Asad, instead of recognizing the uprising against his regime as signifier of a deeper systemic change -sintomático a point of no return Deeper driven more environmental and energy crises has chosen to end what its narrow conception considered the problem: the indignant people.
Similarly, the Syrian resistance circumscribes the problem nefarious, corrupt and oppressive character Extractive Asad regime, ignoring the fact that it came crumbling and previously by deeper biophysical processes that continue to be developed when is gone.
And consequently, while Syria has become a failed state, no one is addressing the same growing process is altering the earth system is causing destabilization of the human system throughout the region. This is not surprising.
If something works by preventing address the causes, rebuild an environmental resilience, new energy systems and strengthen the political and social empowerment, that something is war.
The slow death of the old order based on oil
This myopia still affects officialdom in Iraq, which is not far from systemic state failure of Syria.
US and Iraqi officials are pinning their hopes on the ephemeral dream of turning the country into a thriving oil producer, capable of pumping oil at a rate that rivals its neighbor, Saudi Arabia.
Which it is literally a chimera.
In my new studio, I quote solid data showing that conventional oil production will reach its peak Iraq within a decade, around 2025, then decline. This means that after 2025, the main source of central government revenues start declining to par.
In this context, it is only a matter of time before the state without having identified a new source of income sostenible- is forced to recant.
In this scenario, we can see how the central government will be less and less able to meet basic social expenditures and extremely tightened.
In a normal trajectory, Iraq we know is heading toward a total systemic state failure to approximately 2040.
This is a conservative forecast, in my opinion, is likely to accelerate due to feedback from existing amplified the underlying processes ESD conventional oil depletion, climate change, water scarcity and agricultural crisis; HSD processes and state repression US-backed sectarian, geopolitical competition intensified insurgency and sectarian long-term Islamic State, al Qaeda and other actors.
In short, while the disturbance of the Earth system will slowly and silently unraveled state power, myopic responses are causing destabilization of the human system, leaving a vacuum that increasingly fill more who seek autonomy from the central government and the extremists who are in open war with him.
Not only Iraq and Syria who they are in the path of systemic state failure. Other countries in the region exhibit similar dynamics.
Yemen
In Yemen , for example, conventional petroleum production peaked in 2001 and is now virtually collapsed, recent data. In August 2016, net oil exports had been reduced to "a trickle" that continue until now.
The Yemen of after that peak oil, like Syria and Iraq , exhibits features of growing shortage of water and food.
Electricity production is intermittent and fuel shortages across the nation is a pervasive problem that has forced to close factories and foreign companies and international organizations to suspend operations and withdraw capital and personnel.
This means not only that the main source of state revenue is nearly empty, but its ability to respond to the crisis in a way that is not just reactive symptoms has been fatally inhibited.
Gulf states are not far from the comment cited above. Collectively, the major oil producers could have much less oil than they claim on their books.
Analysts at Lux Research estimate that oil reserves of OPEC may have been exaggerated by up to 70%.
The consequence is that major producers such as Saudi Arabia, could face serious challenges to maintain high production levels that are used in the next decade.
A new study by Dr. Steven Griffiths, vice president of research at Masdar Institute for Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi , peer - reviewed and published in the journal Energy Policy, confirms these concerns.
Dr. Griffiths said that the countries of the OPEC in the Middle East and North Africa in particular may have exaggerated the extent of its reserves.
It indicates proof that "proven reserves of Kuwait may be closer to 24,000 million barrels [than 101,000 million barrels cited by OPEC], and that the reserves of Saudi Arabia may have been overestimated by up to 40%" .
Another example of exaggeration seen in natural gas reserves. Griffiths argues that "the abundance of resources is not equivalent to the abundance of exploitable energy."
While the region has substantial amounts of natural gas, the subinvestments because of subsidies, the terms unattractive investment and the "challenge of the extraction conditions" means that the producers of the Middle East "are not only unable to monetize their reserves for export but also are fundamentally unable to use its reserves to meet domestic energy demands. "
This is particularly important in the Gulf States:
"The GCC countries [Cooperation Council Gulf], for example, have substantial reserves of natural gas associated and non-associated, but all GCC countries, except Qatar, are facing right now a shortage of supply domestic natural gas ".
Griffiths therefore concludes that "the proven hydrocarbon reserves in the MENA region [stands for Middle East and North Africa] can be misleading about the prospects of regional energy self - sufficiency."
food threat
Although this "does not necessarily imply an impending shortage of oil, raising questions over the conventional peak oil".
Go ahead pointing potentially destabilizing implications:
"The MENA countries that have historically depended on the income of their resources to support social and economic agendas, policies and face a series of risks to their actual timetables for implementing the reforms necessary for economies 'post-oil'".
Oil depletion is only one dimension of the ESD processes involved . The other are the environmental consequences of oil exploitation.
In the next three decades, even if climate change is reached stabilize at an average increase of 2 ° Celsius, the Max Planck Institute expects that the Middle East and North Africa will face heat waves and storms prolonged dust that could turn much of the region in "inhabitable" . These processes could destroy much of the agricultural potential of the region.
The Arab Organization for Agricultural Development (AOAD) reports that the Middle East is already experiencing a continuing shortage of agricultural products, a gap that has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. Across the region, food imports are now over 25,000 million dollars annually.
If nothing is done to address these challenges, the 2020-2030 period will witness how the oil exporters of the Middle East suffer a systemic convergence of climate, energy and food crises. These crises weaken their ability to deliver goods and services to their populations.
And the process of systemic state failure we are already seeing in Iraq, Syria and Yemen , will spread throughout the region.
broken models
While some of these climate processes are blocked, not so with their impact on human systems.
The old order in the Middle East is unequivocally collapsed. There can never recover.
But it is not too late yet-East and West to see what is really happening and act immediately to implement the transition to the inevitable post-fossil fuel future.
The battle for Mosul can not defeat the insurgency, because it is part of a process of destabilization of the human system. That process does not provide a fundamental way that addresses the alteration processes of the Earth system that undermine the ground beneath our feet.
The only significant response is to begin to see the crisis as it is, look beyond the dynamics of the symptoms of the same-the sectarianism, insurgency, combates- and address the deeper issues.
That requires thinking the world differently, refocus our mental models of security and prosperity in a way that captures well how human societies are part of environmental systems to respond accordingly.
Maybe then we can understand that we are fighting the wrong war and the result is that no one can win.
As the old order of oil in the Middle East will collapse in the coming years and decades, governments, civil society, companies and investors have an opportunity to build basic structures of posfósiles fuels which can pave the way for new forms of ecological resilience and economic prosperity.
Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist , an expert on international security issues, trying to track and delve into what he calls "crisis of civilization ". He has won the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism Award for his report in The Guardian about the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crisis with regional geopolitics and conflicts. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, le Monde Diplomatique, New Internacionalist, etc.
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