ISIS Is No Reason to Stay in Iraq – By Daniel DePetris (Defense Priorities) / Feb 1 2020
Don’t take the wrong conclusion from recent news about the group’s “resurgence.”
If you have read the headlines over the past few weeks, you can be excused for thinking the Islamic State is rampaging its way across Iraq and Syria again. Stories from the Associated Press and CNN, and reports from U.N. monitors largely follow the same script: ISIS is resurgent.
Unfortunately, what makes for exciting click-bait is not the same as sound analysis. These reports fundamentally misunderstand the threat the Islamic State poses to the United States and wrongly suggest that an indefinite U.S. military presence in Iraq and Syria is the magic formula for keeping the terrorist group down and out.
This isn’t to say ISIS is down for the count. Its fighters continue to launch attacks against security posts and civilians in Iraq and Syria. The group’s territorial caliphate may have been shattered into a million different pieces, but its 15,000 militants are now preying on targets of opportunity. ISIS never stopped its operations: it simply evolved into a low-level insurgency, employing tactics such as set-piece attacks against Iraqi military bases and assaults designed to intimidate the local population. ISIS claimed to have executed 106 attacks in just six days in December. Farmers have been targeted. Hundreds of acres of crops burned. And shepherds in areas without a heavy security presence have seen their cattle stolen.
None of this activity, however, is particularly surprising—nor should the presence of ISIS attacks be used by Washington as an excuse to maintain thousands of U.S. military personnel on the ground. The governments in the Middle East can manage the local threat ISIS poses right now. Indeed, by keeping thousands of U.S. troops on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian border, the Trump administration is inadvertently allowing those very same governments to hide behind the United States and ignore their own responsibility to fight the problem.
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