Rise and Fall of Isis – Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) Terrorist Organization; An International Contagious Virus in the New World Order?

Yıl 2018, Cilt: 4 Sayı: 1, 1 - 35, 10.04.2018

R.s Savaş Biçer Mesut Hakkı Caşin

Öz

From 2013 until the winter of 2016, ISIS has been in confrontation with

Iraqi, Syrian, and Turkish security forces, rival Free Syrian Army, Kurdish

Peshmerga fighters, as well as Russian, Iranian and United States led

Coalition forces. The group’s skill was confirmed by the seizure of crucial

provinces in Syria and the quick collapse of Iraqi forces in Mosul and

elsewhere in northern Iraq, under the determined assault of outnumbered

fighters in the years 2014 and the beginning of 2015. ISIS’s clearance of

the Sunni areas of the central Iraq to the west and north of Baghdad and

the threat to the Kurdish regional areas alarmed the governments across

the whole Middle East and the Western powers, particularly in 2015, and

during that period, it is generally feared that Saudi Arabia and Jordan might

be the next ISIS targets. However, in the year 2016, the strong position of

ISIS has declined in both Syria and Iraq particularly immediately after the

intervention of Turkish Armed Forces to the Syrian territory against ISIS

and the re-organization of the Iraqi Army under the consultancy of United

States advisors.

In Middle East, ISIS marks a new threat to the regional security order, at

a time of Arab Spring uprisings within the Arab societies and creeping

sectarianism fueled mainly by the geostrategic rivalry between Shia and

Sunni states of the region. ISIS not only threatens the survival of the people

from autocratic regimes, but also the stability of neighboring countries. For

military events on the ground to go beyond progress in resolving conflicts

and addressing problems of which ISIS is a symptom would not form a

development as far as international security is concerned. To the extent

that events in Syria and Iraq do have something to do with a threat of

terrorism in the West, that threat will depend not so much on how quickly

ISIS expires but rather on what is left after its expiration. Adapting to the

new peaceful environment and solving Iraq and Syria problems by mutual

understanding will empower the regional countries to limit the spread of

this condition. Failure to do so will not only result in a durable threat from

ISIS to the region as well as the western counties, but also flowing threats

that rise because of continuing challenges to state structures in the Middle

East and human security to the democracies in the West.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Terror, security, war, stability, violence, Salafism

Kaynakça

• 83 Ofra Bengio and Meir Litvak, Sunna and Shi‘a in History: Division and Ecumenism in the Muslim Middle East (Gordonsville, VA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1-16. The notion of collective action refers to Craig Calhoun, “The Problem of Identity in Collective Action,” in Joan Huber, ed., Macro-Micro Linkages in Sociology (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1991), as cited in Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1996), fn. 16, p. 20. 84 Brandon Friedman, Uzi Rabi, Sectarianism and War in Iraq and Syria, available online at; http://www.fpri. org/article/2017/01/sectarianism-war-iraq-syria/, accessed on; 22 January 2017 85 Jeremy Black, Clio’s Battles: Historiography in Practice (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), pp. 216-219. 86 Cordesman, 67.