“The defeats in Mosul and Raqqa will also only be as strong and significant as what happens in the aftermath.”
Through the course of the months-long battles for Mosul and Raqqa, strings of media pundits have volleyed around questions and authoritative statements that decree the defeat of ISIS. And though Ramadan 2017 ended with the first Eid al-Fitr in which the people of Mosul broke fast without the ISIS flag flying in the group’s long-held stronghold in years, reports of its demise are overstated and not sufficient in capitalizing on the momentum.
Successes in the breeding grounds for ISIS—and other extremist group offshoots—are no small feat, to be certain. Both symbolic and strategic in significance, they are vital benchmarks on the long road to restoration in the region. And with Raqqa on the brink of a similar fate, forward progress from a military standpoint is strong. But a focus on the group’s status in its homeland paints an incomplete picture.
With victory in these areas in sight, we are also at the same time reminded of the ideology’s global footprint. The weeks leading to victory in Mosul coincided with a spate of attacks against western targets in western lands, the UK, and France. And throughout the first half of 2017, we have been reminded by our intelligence community that though the thousands of ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria have seen more prosperous times, there are estimates that ISIS and extremist sympathizers throughout the rest of the world number in the millions.
The defeats in Mosul and Raqqa will also only be as strong and significant as what happens in the aftermath. From a psychological warfare perspective, aka “psywar,” the defeat of ISIS in Mosul in particular presents an opportunity to exploit the inabilities of the group’s leadership. A large spoke in the group’s recruitment wheel is offering a leadership capable of establishing and maintaining a caliphate—just as running and leading a state is viewed as a positive and necessary experience for becoming president. In the same manner, an inability to sustain a controlling presence in an area like Mosul can be exploited as a liability and raise doubts about larger territories.
While the data and momentum suggest otherwise, there can be a direct cause and effect of military successes in the Middle East on the broader global war on terror—one that is in favor of western objectives against those aspirational operatives who never have (and never will) set foot in an Arab land. But that still relates to the group specifically and fails to account for the ideology. If ISIS is indeed on its last legs and there are still 30 million-plus extremists planning acts of violence in the name of jihad, does it really matter?
That is to say, it’s not enough to simply float the group’s final days. Rather, to further our psywar tactics, it’s imperative that US policy stays out ahead of the defeat and that it does so in a way that presents the enemy as feckless and exposes the limits of their reach and abilities. As the battle for resumption of land control takes place over there, we are at war for hearts and minds over here.
But without keeping the throttle down, we risk presenting opportunities for a counter-psywar effort—a strong suit of the group’s propaganda wing that presents the bad guy as the victim. Thanks to sound strategy and execution by our military and that of our allies, the narrative telling the story of ISIS’ defeat has begun. It needs to be up to us, and not them, to make sure the story continues.
