Let’s talk about Mosul

Mosul. Second largest city in Iraq. Currently held by Islamic State and encircled by a range of forces made up of Kurdish Peshmerga, regular Iraqi army troops and paramilitary police, irregular Sunni militias and assorted licensed bandits there for the scrap. Every TV channel worth the name has embedded correspondents sending breathless packages back to HQ, and by day three of the assault there are no reports of serious fighting and only a trickle of refugees. The UN agencies are ready for up to 400,000 but possibly more and reports as I type are of IS using civilians as human shields — a tactic they have used before. Most analysts predict that Mosul will fall to coalition forces, likely after a long hard fight and victory will be proclaimed. And that is where it all starts to go to worms.

There has been little in the Pakistan media of late about Islamic State and their presence or otherwise, and that is just how IS likes it. They are below the horizon, under the radar, in the undergrowth, pick the cliché of your choice. But make no mistake they are still around, and they will still be around in Mosul after the fall, and still around in Raqqa, their ideological home, and everywhere else that they currently occupy which let us not forget is a large swathe of territory the length of the Fertile Crescent. Because IS is as much idea as it is entity and in the creation of the borderless caliphate that idea is made corporeal — and its reach is global.

Check out the media reports. Many speak of IS losing ground, of territory being rolled back. Few, very few, speak of the defeat of an idea. Ideas can never be un-had, and they are the mother of invention. The steam engine cannot be un-invented, nor the wheel. Both started life as an idea. Communism and Fascism were ideas that grew into discourse, became textual and then popular physical movements. Ideas are of their time, some durable others less so, but all essentially immortal waxing and waning as time and circumstance roll ever onward.

Ideas do not go through some kind of quality control process, there are good and bad, with some of both alive and well and it is all highly subjective. Not all bad ideas are bad for everybody, some are bad for some but good for others and paradoxes are born. Such is IS. Brutal and ruthless and intolerant as it is for some it is the epitome, the ideal, that apex they aspire to with what is perceived as its purity and loyalty to a set of founding ideals, the bedrock idea for others.

As the IS fighters — and there may only be 8,000 at most in Mosul — begin to fold and quietly merge with the ochre background the idea that is their motive power remains burning. Less bright perhaps and not with the same corporeal power, but not extinguished.

In purely military terms the Taliban were never defeated when the Americans invaded Afghanistan and they remain undefeated to this day. Indeed they have outlasted the forces ranged against them and they are resurgent and ascendant. IS in Mosul will also merge into the background. Some will gravitate to Europe there to create fear and terror with low-casualty but high impact attacks; others fold themselves into one of the factions fighting in the Syrian wars, still others to the Maghrib where there is no shortage of fellow travellers.

There is another potential consequence of the fall of Mosul also, and again one that is rarely — so far — in the headlines and that is that it may contribute to the fall of Iraq itself, the final collapse of the state along the ever-present sectarian fault lines. This is no cheap scaremongering. The fall of Mosul may feed into the wider conflict that has played out since the coalition forces for the most part left. Whatever was in the minds of the planners when they were putting together the plans that unseated Saddam Hussain they most certainly had not factored in ideas, the hardboiled ideas that were the midwives of Islamic State. Mosul. It really does matter.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 19^th, 2016.

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