Civilisation declared victory in the wasteland of Mosul on July 10. Three years had passed since Iraq’s second largest city was overrun by the Islamic State militia (IS, known also by its Arab acronym of Daesh). Liberation came at a tremendous cost but Iraq’s government was not pausing to count. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered week-long celebrations and turned his attention to rooting out the Daesh from areas to which it had retreated from the tumult of Mosul.

In the strategy of ‘capture, hold and rebuild’ that the anti-insurgency book of rules teaches, Iraq now faces the challenge of restoring Mosul to a semblance of habitability. The shadowy military formations of the Daesh can function like armies of conquest and occupation when called to, but also melt away and surrender territory when opportune. In the fragmented political geography of Iraq, there are open spaces in a string of small towns south of the Kurdish autonomous region. Since proudly claiming to have effaced the border with Syria, a baneful colonial bequest in its portrayal, the Daesh has opened up further territory into which it could retreat.

As Mosul was taken, an assemblage of Kurdish and Arab forces had breached the old city walls in Raqqa in northern Syria, the self-proclaimed capital of the Daesh’s ostensible khalifa . Begun at the same time as the Mosul offensive last October, the battle for Raqqa was expected to result in victory within weeks if not days. As in Mosul, an inquiry by UN human rights monitors early in June found that the civilian casualties inflicted by US air strikes in Raqqa had been “staggering”.

Destruction and displacement on a truly monumental scale are the twin legacies of the US invasion of Iraq and the civil war in Syria. The Daesh is only the most recent of the forms taken by the rapidly mutating forces unleashed by the collapse of centralised State authority.

Some of the emerging strategic complexities are foretold by the wild congeries of allies that the master strategist of the new political cartography is compelled to work with. In Mosul, the US is working in ostensible alliance with Iraq’s national army, which has incorporated a number of the militias spawned by the country’s newly empowered Shia majority. The US, for these elements, is a contingent alliance. Their more durable bonds lie with Iran, the neighbour to the east.

Iran, which has set itself up as guardian of an alternative conception of Islamic rectitude, seems to reciprocate the warmth. As the battle of Mosul entered its final phases, fighters were urged on to victory by the entire galaxy of the Iranian political leadership, from the supreme spiritual leader Ayatollah Khamenei to the commander of its secretive Quds Force, General Qassem Soleimani. There was abundant irony in Soleimani’s felicitations, as also his assertion that Iran had kept up a “round-the-clock” supply of arms to the Iraqi army.

In the chaos of the Islamic world today, Iran has been identified as an especially negative influence by the US-Israel alignment. For Iran and the US to collaborate even unwittingly in a strategic aim is just one index of how convoluted and transient are perceptions of friend and foe in the region.

Iraq’s Diyala province neighbouring Iran was an earlier laboratory for the creation of a khalifa , at a time when the Islamic jihad project was believed to be limited within the al-Qaeda franchise. The provincial capital of Baquba was where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi first proclaimed the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), proudly owning his vassalage to the putative emir of the al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden.

Zarqawi was killed shortly afterwards, but the province was lost to the al-Qaeda by the end of 2006. A few months later, the US military, acting largely on its own, launched a brutal offensive to retake Baquba. An insurgent presence remained in peripheral towns, and in 2014, the Daesh swept through the province to retake it as part of a new incarnation of the khalifa , completely independent of al-Qaeda.

Resistance came from Iran’s proxies who entrenched themselves in the province as the Daesh pulled out to better organise in more prized locations such as Mosul. Iran then began to assemble a strategic land-bridge to Syria through parts of Iraqi Kurdistan, carefully manoeuvring around Daesh-held territory and seeking a point of transit through Tal Afar, west of Mosul.

A strategic inconvenience has arisen from the intent of the main political actors in Iraqi Kurdistan to conduct a referendum on total independence by September. Traditionally well-disposed towards the Kurdish groups in this region, Iran would not want this complication at this juncture. The oil States led by Saudi Arabia, alarmed at Iraq’s potential subjection to Iran, may wave the referendum on, though furtively since the US has clearly signalled its disapproval. By openly aligning with Kurdish groups in Syria in its campaign against the Daesh, the US, however, risks conveying a contrary signal. For Turkey, which is by virtue of NATO membership the closest US ally in the region, the signals are all negative.

The assertion of Kurdish identity could reconfigure the map across a wide swathe from Iran to Turkey. And a tripartite agreement between the US, Russia and Jordan to enforce a truce in south-western Syria, prefigures still another strategic intent, to redraw the map in a region of special sensitivity to Israel.

Sukumar Muralidharan teaches at the school of journalism, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat

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