Was Waleed Aly right about Islamic State being ‘weak

Was Waleed Aly right about Islamic State being ‘weak

WALEED Aly has earned worldwide acclaim for condemning Islamic State but was he actually right about the group being “weak”?

On Monday night The Project co-host urged Australians to remain united in the face of a Paris attack claimed by the extremist group, while also suggesting that ISIS or ISIL (as Islamic State is also known) was acting out of weakness.

“ISIL’s weak, I know it doesn’t look like that right now but it’s the truth and they don’t want you to know it,” he said on The Project.Aly said Islamic State had lost a significant part of its territory and didn’t want people to know that it could quickly be crushed if it ever faced a proper army on a battlefield.

They want you to fear them. They want you to get angry. They want all of us to become hostile and here is why:

“ISIL’s strategy is to split the world into two camps. It is that black and white.”

Deakin University’s terrorism expert Professor Greg Barton said while he wouldn’t describe Islamic State as “weak”, he believed they were becoming increasingly vulnerable.

Prof Barton said air strikes targeting oilfields in Syria were especially damaging because a lot of their internal financing came from selling oil.

“There is a certain brittleness of the situation ... if they can’t get enough oil, that would put them under pressure,” Prof Barton told news.com.au, adding the group also relied on oil to keep its strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa running.

A recent Vox article detailing setbacks to Islamic State’s campaign in Syria and Iraq, suggested this could actually make it more dangerous.

Prof Barton agreed losing territory could push the group toward more international attacks, in order to seem strong.

“You would expect that as Islamic State comes under pressure, they would be conscious of keeping their brand name strong and would push out more foreign attacks,” Prof Barton said.

One of the reasons Islamic State is so successful at attracting foreign recruits is that it sells itself as an Islamic caliphate that is destined to claim victory against the west, in line with an ancient prophecy.

But Prof Barton said Islamic State had probably always planned to expand, firstly through lone wolf attacks and more recently through coordinated and large casualty events such as the attack in Paris that killed more than 132 people.

“It would be their fallback position as they come under pressure on the battlefield, but they have obviously been thinking about this for a long time, they’re not fools,” he said.

Even if Islamic State’s territory was diminishing, Prof Barton said he did not think the group would disappear any time soon.

“Even if IS lose half their territory in Iraq and Syria, they could be hard to deal with globally,” he said.

He said al-Qeada, which only had a few hundred supporters had still managed to pull off the 9/11 attack. Islamic State was even more agile than al-Qaeda and had also been able to recruit members more quickly using social media. It currently boasts about 40,000 to 50,000 fighters.

Despite being known for its use of technology to reach potential recruits, Prof Barton said IS had also shown it could go off the digital grid and catch people by surprise using old school methods, as was shown during the Paris attack.

“Even if they are undermined they will still be a formidable organisation and will have a long half-life,” he said. “They can be defeated but will not be resolved as quickly as al-Qaeda.

While the US and other western countries had made mistakes that likely contributed to the rise of Islamic State, including the invasion of Iraq, Prof Barton said he did not think walking away from the conflict would be the best course of action.

He agreed with other commentators that a military solution was necessary to defeat Islamic State but said the devil was in the detail. He believed working with local troops including the Syrian army and Kurdish fighters was the best way forward, not sending in western forces.

“None of this is easy, there’s a reason why we have put it into the too-hard basket because it is hard but unfortunately being risk averse has allowed the civil war in Syria to carry on for five years and take hundreds of thousands of lives, that’s tragic,” he said.

While working with the Syrian regime was seen as an unpalatable option, Prof Barton said this was probably the lesser evil and was the direction that western powers needed to head.