Rise of the Islamic State: Dangerous New Threat to Stability in Strife-torn West Asia

New Threat in West Asia

In the second week of November 2015, militants from Abu Bakr AlBaghdadi’s self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate – also called ISIS, ISIL and Daesh – struck multiple targets in Beirut, Paris and Mali. Earlier, on 31 October, ISIS claimed to have brought down an Airbus aircraft of the Russian airliner Metrojet soon after it took off from the Sinai resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on a flight to St. Petersburg.

Upping the ante in West Asia by several notches, President Francois Hollande of France virtually declared war on the ISIS and sent a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to the region. In order to better coordinate US air strikes, President Barack Obama approved the deployment of 50 Special Forces personnel to fight the Islamic State. And, President Vladimir Putin of Russia joined in with air strikes. One Russian fighter aircraft was reportedly shot down by Turkey for violating its air space.

During the Cold War, the state of turmoil in West Asia used to be an accurate barometer of the world’s political climate. At that time, the two superpowers jockeyed for power and influence in the oil rich region through their proxies but were not directly involved in any of the conflicts in the region. That situation has now changed and both Russia and the United States are now direct participants in the crisis in Iraq and Syria.

In the current manifestation of instability in the perpetually strife-torn West Asian region, the charge is led by the virulently radical Sunni militants of the Islamic Caliphate proclaimed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The ISIS is engaged in a vicious fight with the armed forces of Iraq and Syria and the Peshmerga – forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) from the Kurdish belt along the Iraq-Turkey border. It has captured territory in Iraq and Syria and demonstrated its ability to defend its gains. In the civil war that has been raging in Syria since 2012, almost 2,50,000 people have been killed and thousands of refugees have begun migrating to Europe; many hundreds have perished in the attempt.

Further west, Palestinian attackers backed by the Fatah and Hamas have been clashing with the Israeli security forces on a daily basis, with casualties on both sides. The growing violence, attributed to Palestinian anger with Israel’s continuing occupation, has sparked fears of a new intifada on multiple fronts. Disagreements over prayers at the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa mosque in Israel-controlled East Jerusalem are aggravating the tensions. Elsewhere, not too far away in Africa, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia are still mired in the aftermath of the tribulations of the Arab Spring and armed conflict continues in South Sudan that became independent in 2011. On the Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia is engaged in fighting the Houthis on its border with Yemen and making heavy weather of it.

The security environment in the perpetually strife-torn West Asian region has deteriorated so rapidly in recent years that the region has become an area of extreme concern for the international community. The advent of the Islamic Caliphate, driven by ultra hard-line Sunni fighters, poses a new challenge to peace and stability in a region that supplies much of the world’s oil and gas. The real long-term danger arises from the inability of Iraq and Syria to eliminate the threat posed to their sovereignty by the ISIS. Syria’s long-term ally Iran – and its proxy the Hezbollah, the Shia militia based in Lebanon – have come to Syria’s aid and deployed their forces to fight the ISIS, but the militia has shown remarkable resilience.