US declines to prioritize Kobane as ISIL creeps toward Baghdad

Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion last weekend that defending the besieged Syrian town of Kobane “does not define” the U.S.-led strategy against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the face of the greater priority of saving Iraq has reinforced a perception among many that Washington hasn't yet figured out how to combat the extremists in Syria without boosting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

But as ISIL marches relentlessly through Iraq’s Anbar province, where it captured a military base on Monday and inched closer to Baghdad, critics of the U.S.-led effort are questioning its effectiveness even in a country where it has a far-reaching mandate from the government and its airstrikes are supported by local ground forces. 

Since taking aim at Kobane several weeks ago, ISIL fighters have surrounded the cities of Ramadi and Haditha in Anbar and have overrun the town of Hit, sending 180,000 people fleeing for their lives. Local leaders in the Sunni-dominated province have requested that Baghdad allow the return of U.S. ground forces to Iraq, just a year after their much-heralded departure. American strikes, partnered by the more than 50,000 Iraqi troops stationed in Anbar, have not been enough to fend off the insurgents; only elite U.S. forces can save them now, Anbar’s leaders say. 

“Iraq is now like a drowning man who has no choice but to ask for help,” a senior security adviser told Al Jazeera’s Suadad al-Salhy, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Some analysts say the crisis in Kobane has served as a diversion for ISIL, highlighting both their strategic savvy and the fact that even in Iraq, the United States needs more help to quell the insurgency.  

And the challenge of uprooting the extremists in predominantly Sunni parts of Iraq was underscored by an Amnesty International report released Monday, alleging that Shia militias have been carrying out random attacks on Sunnis in reprisal for ISIL attacks and that the Shia-dominated government security forces have allowed these militias to operate with impunity. 

“Kobane has been useful to the group in that it’s focused a lot of media attention on one town, allowing them to keep the world’s attention there while it steals a lot of ground in places like Anbar,” said Matthew Henman, manager of IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center. “The U.S. coalition can’t be everywhere at once, but there’s also a limit to how much air power they can do without it seeming like an occupation, or mission creep.”

Kerry’s comments at a conference in Cairo came amid a political stalemate between the U.S. and Turkey, the two countries best equipped to intervene decisively in Kobane.

Washington has ruled out sending in ground troops to defeat ISIL in either Iraq or Syria. Meanwhile, Turkey, which borders the Kurdish enclave, appears unwilling to either risk empowering Syria’s Kurds — who are allied with the Kurdish PKK insurgency in Turkey — or do anything it believes will boost the Assad regime. Ankara has made clear it has no interest in joining any military intervention in Syria that doesn't also target Assad, a course of action the U.S. has declined to pursue. 

Even arming the town’s Kurdish defenders is complicated, given their ties to the PKK, an armed separatist organization of Turkish Kurds designated a terrorist organization by Ankara and Washington. Turkey also doesn’t want to encourage Syria’s Kurds, who have carved out a semiautonomous region along Turkey’s border and largely abandoned the rebellion against Assad.

Barack Obama’s administration has repeatedly acknowledged that airstrikes alone cannot save Kobane. Deflecting criticism that the U.S. and its allies were abandoning the town of 40,000 to imminent ISIL takeover and almost certain mass atrocities, Kerry said Kobane “does not define the strategy for the coalition in respect to Daesh,” using the Arabic term for ISIL.

The situation there is a tragedy, he said, “but we have said from day one that it is going to take a period of time to bring the coalition thoroughly to the table to rebuild some of the morale and capacity of the Iraqi army. And to begin the focus of where we ought to be focusing first, which is in Iraq.”

The U.S. still has not prepared a strategy for dealing with ISIL in Syria, where the group controls over one-third of the country, and many analysts warn Washington's plan to arm and train Syria’s floundering “moderate” rebels will never create a viable ground partner to counter both ISIL and Assad. That not only reduces the effectiveness of U.S. airstrikes on ISIL targets but also potentially paints the U.S. as hypocritical for helping the Assad regime after years of calling for its downfall.

“To a certain extent, regardless of the humanitarian situation in Kobane, the U.S. has to recognize that its hands are tied and that it isn’t able to affect things on the ground as much as it would like,” said Henman. “It has to focus efforts on Iraq, where it can have more impact.”

But even in Iraq, where the U.S. is trying to roll back ISIL and clear ground for the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga forces to take over — and where an ostensibly more inclusive Baghdad government  has been formed in hope of turning minority Sunnis away from the insurgency — the campaign to degrade and destroy the extremist group continues to stumble.

Airstrikes have chased the insurgents across their vast holdings, only to see fresh ISIL offensives in other places across the group’s holdings in Syria and Iraq, in what has been likened to a game of whack-a-mole. This week's intertwined crises in Kobane and Anbar are only the latest iteration of a pattern; last month ISIL dispersed in northern Iraq under airstrike pressure and stormed Kobane days later.

Sending in U.S. ground troops, however, remains only a remote possibility, even as hawkish lawmakers such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., renew their calls for that step. Baghdad has said it will not allow another U.S. invasion and has specifically rebuffed Anbar’s latest calls for U.S. ground forces. And the White House knows the American public has little appetite for another ground war in Iraq, especially one pitted against a group that analysts do not believe poses a credible, imminent threat to U.S. national security.

The U.S. says it is folding dozens more nations into the anti-ISIL coalition in order to broaden aerial support for allied ground forces, wherever they exist. But analysts say the lesson from Anbar is that even with wider support, a hands-off campaign against a resilient insurgency like ISIL will be a long and arduous fight.

According to Henman, “as soon as the U.S. focus on Anbar, we have to expect ISIL will regroup elsewhere.”

Slideshow: Over one million flee fighting in Kobane