With much of the West’s focus now fixed on Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, it appears that EU leaders have lost sight of another threat looming in the Middle East.
The terrorist group Islamic State (IS) has been preparing the ground for a resurgence and has been able to exploit the security vacuum, instability and lack of broader international engagement to rebuild its networks and strength across the region where it operated before.
After an internationally backed and hard-fought campaign against the self-proclaimed Caliphate across Iraq and Syria, that culminated in the gruesome last stand of IS remnants at Baghouz, the international coalition under the leadership of the U.S. were quick to claim victory. Since then, the international community has ignored numerous warnings that the threat posed by the group is far from over as grievances amongst the Sunni Arab population remained unaddressed.
The terrorist group used the campaign waged against them as a crucible to distinguish the true believers and had prepared accordingly to survive and, more importantly, outlast their adversaries. Its remnants found refuge in the security vacuums of contested regions in both Syria and Iraq, as former uneasy regional allies began to revisit their own respective grievances with one another.
Extortion, theft and illegal trade across porous borders has allowed the group to secure new sources of revenue while assassinations and deliberate attacks kept key areas unstable and allowed its members to regain confidence.
The thousands of IS family members that were captured and sent to detention camps guarded by the People's Protection Units (YPG) of the Kurdish Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria (AANES or Rojava) gradually began to gain control, forcing their rules through shadow courts upon the people that were displaced because of the fighting in the first place.
Those found wanting were severely beaten, tortured or killed. The situation got so bad that the security forces had to initiate a security operation in August over several weeks to regain control of the largest refugee camp at al-Hawl with its estimated 65,000 inhabitants, the majority of them women and children.
In the aftermath of the operation, it became very clear that the camp had become the new epicentre of IS activity, with most of the contraband seized sourced by the online "social support" funding scheme for the families living in the camp. In total more than 200 arrests were made, 25 tunnels and hideouts were uncovered and a plethora of weapons and explosives were seized by the local security forces.
The lack of broader and consistent Western support leaves the AANES in a precarious situation where the fledgling democracy is forced to conduct in knife-edge diplomacy with other factions in order to provide a sense of stability and continuity for the people within its territory. Exempting the AANES from the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 – US sanctions against the Syrian government - would allow the region to address crucial issues the region is facing.
The recurring problems the AANES faces are funding and expertise. A deradicalization centre that was set up in al-Hawl had some success in turning dozens of youngsters away from the extremist beliefs they had been exposed to, but in order to get real results, there is a need for at least ten more of these centres in al-Hawl alone as around half the population of al-Hawl are children, teenagers and adolescents. Leaving these numbers without any prospect is a disaster waiting to happen.
Threat from Turkey and EU’s role
Perhaps the biggest threat to the stability of North-East Syria comes from its northern neighbour Turkey, which continues to look for opportunities to invade and establish a security corridor of its own along the Syrian-Turkish border on Syrian soil.
With the domestic issues that the Turkish people are facing, president Erdogan finds himself in an increasingly vulnerable position for the upcoming elections next year. He has stated at every occasion that he would not allow a terrorist group to remain so close to Turkey's border and present a threat to its national security, referring to the dominant Kurdish presence in Rojava and its military wing which he claims is linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey.
However, he fails to account for the facts that not only his own Syrian proxies, including the Syrian National Army, consist of former jihadist extremists that act like warlords and fight each other more than not but also that the last two caliphs of the Islamic State were residing in Turkish occupied territories in Syria and that the terror group still has strong cross-border networks across Turkey.
Keeping Turkey out of Syria is one of the few things Washington and Moscow currently agree on. But as Russian forces continue to suffer serious setbacks in Ukraine, Moscow is forced to leave theatres like these more vulnerable. Just recently, the S-400 anti-air defence system Moscow had operating in Syria was shipped back to Russia and the Kremlin-aligned private military company Wagner has been redeploying contractors to Ukraine in an attempt to shore up the front line with more experienced troops.
Turkey has manoeuvred itself in a position of mediator in the Ukrainian-Russian war and might be looking for Moscow to sign off on a “Special Military Operation” of its own, which Putin could allow if not only out of spite for the West's support for Ukraine.
The EU on its part has thus far failed to find reliable strategic partners that truly embody the values the EU claims to uphold. The nature of EU politics takes time and consensus, and looking to stabilize regions not only adjacent to its borders seems inevitable with the challenges the world is facing.
High-Representative Josep Borrell, EU’s foreign policy chief, was probably referring to this when he undiplomatically characterised the world into ‘the EU garden’ and the ‘jungle’ of the most of the rest of the world in his speech at the inauguration of the new European Diplomatic Academy at the College of Europe in Bruges. His remarks are eerily reminiscent of the colonial Western imperialist concept of ‘White Man's Burden’ to ‘having to go out and civilize the world’.
As the world’s largest trading bloc, the EU has a lot of weight and leverage to throw around but it should be careful in how it does so to avoid alienating its current and potential partners. I would invite the EU’s High Representative to visit the Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp, which had a temporary exposition on international immigration focused on the refugees that came to the EU in 2016. There was a quote there from a refugee called Noor that provides an apt answer to his unfortunate statement. “You need different kinds of flowers to have a beautiful garden”.
By Bart Rombouts
