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THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
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Following the proclamation of the caliphate
on 29 June, and now under its current name,
DAESH has tried to make the most of the power
vacuum in Baghdad and win over a good part
of those who Nouri al-Maliki (now ousted from
the post of prime minister) had gradually disap-
pointed for various reasons. DAESH, then, has
been able to add several Sunni militias - such as
Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah, Jaish al-Mujahiden
and Naqshbandiyya Way - to its own forces. It
also enjoyed the initial calculated passiveness of
the Kurdish Peshmerga, who were waiting for
Al-Maliki to be more generous with his econom-
ic offers (increasing the percentage of national
oil revenues agreed between Baghdad and Erbil,
set at 17% of the total until then) and political
concessions (guaranteeing the election of a
Kurd to replace the head of state and more
clout in the new government led by Haider al-
Abadi). Lastly, another factor that explains the
apparent success of the first phase of its offen-
sive was that it benefited from the considerable
lack of motivation on the part of the Iraqi mili-
tary units located in the middle ground between
Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan. A large percent-
age of them were Sunni soldiers who had no
desire to face enemies from their own doctrinal
branch. In fact, there were no real battles for
control of places and zones of strategic value,
rather a widespread and hasty withdrawal on
the part of the government forces (action that
the government in Erbil immediately made the
most of to increase its dominions by 40%, in-
cluding the important oil zone of Kirkuk, thanks
to the rapid deployment of its Peshmerga).
Yet in the face of the evident threat, and as
if we had failed to learn hardly anything over
the last few years, the response once again has
been the activation of an international coalition
led by Washington, which since 8 August has
been carrying out a campaign of air strikes
against DAESH on Syrian and Iraqi soil. At the
same time, the training of Iraqi soldiers and
Kurdish Peshmerga is now under way in order
to launch a ground offensive within a matter of
months.
The problem is not the repeated use of mili-
tary instruments at this stage. It is clear that at
present there is not the slightest possibility of
negotiating with DAESH (all the more so follow-
ing the farce with Jordan that followed the cap-
ture of one of its pilots last December) and the
basic goal today is its elimination. However, that
cannot conceal the fact that, on the one hand,
what has happened is largely the result of past
mistakes, both those made by the local govern-
ments and by the Western powers by backing
partners who are hardly renowned for their
democratic leanings and who use their power
to subjugate populations they do not like, be-
lieving that they always had them under con-
trol; and on the other, that without a parallel
effort (and one that is more important than the
purely military one) in the social, political and
economic field, it is only possible, at best, to buy
some time before the problem flares up again
even more seriously.
At this point, and despite the uncertainty
that currently characterises the state of war in
which DAESH and its makeshift allies, on the
one hand, face the United States at the head of
a coalition that even Panama has just joined, on
the other, it is feasible to predict the outcome in
the medium term. Under the impact of the US
military machinery (with the occasional contri-
bution from Arab countries such as Jordan, the
United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia
and Qatar) DAESH has seen its offensive in both
Syria and Iraq held back, forcing it to cling to
the ground conquered up to last summer and
admitting defeat in places that it had defined as
emblematic (Kobani and Deir ez-Zor, both of