Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the War for the Caliphate. Mike Giglio. New York: Public Affairs, 2019.
Mike Giglio spent five years based in Istanbul, reporting on conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine. In Shatter the Nations, Giglio leverages the network of sources he built while reporting on the war with the Islamic State to explain the rise of the Islamic State, their reign of terror, and the “ragtag groups” who (at least temporarily) put aside their differences to defeat them.[1] In doing so, he argues not only that the Islamic State “redefin[ed] what a modern extremist group could be,” but also that the fight against them represented a “new kind of U.S. war” that relies on U.S. special operations forces, drones, and close air support and outsources the war’s suffering and sacrifices to local soldiers and civilians caught in the crossfire.[2]
While earlier analyses of the Islamic State tend to focus on their rise, their historical ties to Al Qaeda, and their key leaders, Giglio had the benefit of seeing the history of the physical caliphate unfold through to its conclusion.[3] As a result, he tries to strike a balance between the rise of the Islamic State and its eventual fall and begins his story in Syria with the Arab Spring. As Syria broke apart into tiny fiefdoms ruled by various armed groups who each tried to install their own bureaucracies, Giglio explains how the Islamic State differentiated themselves by the efficiency of their bureaucracies and how they specifically targeted areas rich in resources like oil and generated revenues by establishing tax systems and demanding tributes.
The global appeal of the Islamic State’s brand, their social media recruiting capabilities, and their foreign fighter network also helped them recruit fighters in the tens of thousands. As a result, the Islamic State was able to become mostly self-sufficient, whereas other rebel groups remained dependent on benefactors in the Gulf region. Furthermore, their very ruthlessness proved to be an advantage, as the Islamic State assassinated rivals and implemented draconian population control measures. While these insights are not unique, Giglio proffers them by skillfully weaving together a series of very vivid and very human accounts from rebels, smugglers, human traffickers, and jihadists alike.[4]
Giglio uses one such story to explain “the genius of the ISIS survival strategy” and, in doing so, illustrates the difficulties associated with cutting off local support for terrorist groups.[5] He introduces an oil smuggler named Mohamed, who is representative of the shadow network on which the Islamic State relied for support.[6] Mohamed was representative of a network of occasional supporters who could not be as readily targeted as Islamic State members, but could still be called upon and incentivized to perform particular duties.[7] This example comports with scholarship born from recent counterinsurgency campaigns that warn against the perils of forcing a traditional concept of war featuring two polarized sides onto a conflict characterized by multiple actors in a fragmented political environment.[8]
When he moves on to his discussion of the fight against the Islamic State and the fall of Mosul, Giglio does an excellent job explaining the unfortunate over-reliance on, and misuse of, the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Force, specifically, and Iraqi special operations forces more generally.[9] Special does not simply mean better, but rather that these soldiers are trained explicitly for specialized missions like capturing high-value targets—not for being the lead unit of a street fight more reminiscent of Stalingrad. The casualty toll on the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Force and Iraqi special operations forces even before the clearance of Mosul began had been enormous. However, since they were the only effective fighting force, they had to continue suffering these casualties in the name of clearance operations. A couple of U.S. special operations forces truisms are relevant in this regard, namely, “special operations forces cannot be mass produced,” and “special operations forces cannot be created after emergencies occur.”[10] Given the casualties the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Force suffered, it is thus unsurprising that Giglio encountered some of their new soldiers flaunting a green banner of Imam Hussein, the Shia martyr. Standards had dropped, and the most professional, inclusive force was seeing signs of sectarianism seep into its ranks. Senior defense officials and U.S. Special Operations Command’s own comprehensive review have similarly attributed recent discipline issues and ethical challenges in the U.S. special operations forces community to a high operational tempo and their being overstretched and overburdened.[11]
Iraqi special forces in Mosul (AP)
Since U.S. special operations forces comprise such a central element of Giglio’s new kind of U.S. war, the book would have benefitted from more discussion of what their support actually entailed and how they provided it. Giglio does describe some of the support functions conventional forces provided these special operators and even interacts with some of them, noting they were the very “boots on the ground that Americans didn’t want in Iraq and that their president had promised not to send.”[12] Thus, it seems a bit of a cop-out for Giglio simply to describe these special operators as “the secret kind, small groups of commandos whose every mission was classified” and claim they would not have spoken with him anyway, especially given the sheer number of books on U.S. special operations forces that have been published since the attacks on September 11, 2001.[13] Other than generic descriptions of U.S. special operations forces support, they remain largely absent from the story even though they played a crucial role in reenergizing the Iraqi Army attack (thus, relieving pressure on the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Force) into eastern Mosul after it had stalled out.[14] Furthermore, while Giglio’s new-kind-of-war thesis implies a relatively sudden change driven by the bind in which the Obama administration found itself, other recent work suggests the rise of U.S. special operations forces into the force of choice was more of a gradual evolution (and uphill battle) over the first 75 years of their existence.[15]
Giglio’s discussion of U.S. involvement in the fight against the Islamic State is particularly relevant, given the Trump administration’s emphasis on stopping endless wars. Giglio’s commentary and observations seem contradictory at times and are lacking in tangible alternatives, underscoring the harsh reality that there are no simple solutions to conflicts that, especially in the Middle East, sometimes date back hundreds of years.
Giglio is critical of the perceived indecision of the Obama administration and the Solomonic approach they tried to take, channeling weapons and ammunition to rival groups in Syria but never the heavy weapons and surface-to-air missiles they had promised or that would make a real difference. While Giglio’s frustration is evident, he does not explain what the United States might have done differently. Instead, he recounts how the Iraqi Army, ostensibly 250,000 strong and which was “intended to be a legacy of stability,” fell so easily to the Islamic State.[16] The United States has engaged in an endless series of campaigns across the Islamic world since the 1980s designed to promote peace and stability. However, they have resulted in precisely the opposite, and it remains unclear how more U.S. involvement in this instance might have somehow ended differently.[17] Additionally, despite its depiction of seemingly global conflict and the war against the Islamic State as one between two global armies, the book does little to address the geopolitical maneuvering the fight against the Islamic State and the revolution in Syria spawned.[18] Addressing the broader geostrategic landscape and how political leaders and senior policy officials might have shaped it differently given an alternative American or coalition response might have added more weight to Giglio’s criticisms.
Giglio even hints at the limitations of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. He seems to offer an implicit commentary concerning how the United States has mistakenly attempted to project its central government and idealistic values on the tribally and familial-based Iraq. He juxtaposes American soldiers with sterling physiques who volunteer to deploy to wars of choice overseas to fight for principles with those in the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Force, who endure endless fighting and destruction, not for their country or their flag, but for their families. Giglio quotes one Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Force soldier as saying, “If I tell you I’m only doing it for my country, that’s bullshit.”[19]
Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Forces (Iraqi News)
The endless cycle of violence is a theme that runs throughout the book, so as the fight against the Islamic State plays out, the reader naturally questions what the coalition against the Islamic State was doing to break the cycle and ensure this degree of violence does not recur. Giglio offers no explicit commentary, but he paints a troubling picture that helps provide a greater understanding of why the United States struggles to disengage from the region. Shia militia were carving out territory in eastern Mosul after it had been cleared, and the Islamic State was glorifying the suicide attacks of local fighters, hoping to inspire local sympathies and lay the groundwork for their return. The Islamic State was also leveraging its shadow network of smugglers to escape and move into Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Force officers seemed resigned to continue fighting post-Islamic State, possibly against the Shia militia.[20] The sentiment expressed concerning the future is thus not very encouraging. It suggests that the Islamic State, for all of its destruction, will likely go down as merely another chapter in an endless cycle of violence—in part created by the previous one, and undoubtedly shaping the next. Furthermore, it seems to underscore that there is never a right time to exit a conflict with no clear winner (and somewhat ambiguous objectives).
Part memoir, part commentary, and part war story, Shatter the Nations is an accessible, engaging primer on the Islamic State…
Giglio laments that Americans, who still claim to be at war, have made little effort to understand the Islamic State beyond their high-profile attacks. Part memoir, part commentary, and part war story, Shatter the Nations is an accessible, engaging primer on the Islamic State and the challenges facing the region that hopefully serves as an antidote to the war weariness and lack of interest Giglio observes in the American public.
Sean Barrett is a U.S. Marine Corps officer. He served with Special Operations Task Force-North in northern Iraq from November 2016 to April 2017. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: An Islamic State fighter in Raqqa, Syria (Getty)
Notes:
[1] Giglio, 178.
[2] Giglio, 80, 3.
[3] See, for example, Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (New York: Regan Arts, 2015); Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, ISIS: The State of Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2016); Joby Warrick, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS (New York: Anchor, 2016); William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (New York: Picador Paper, 2016).
[4] McCants, for example, argues that the Islamic State demonstrated that “doomsday pronouncements and extreme violence attract bloodthirsty recruits, and that cutting out the hearts and minds of a population can subdue them faster than trying to win them over.” McCants, Apocalypse, 159. Stern and Berger focus extensively on the Islamic State’s message and their “electronic brigades” and psychological warfare capabilities. Stern and Berger, State of Terror. Weiss and Hassan dedicate a chapter of their book, “The Management of Savagery,” to explaining how Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, adhering closely to Abu Bakr Naji’s Management of Savagery, capitalized on Sunni disenfranchisement to foment a societal breakdown. Part of this strategy entailed conducting terrorist attacks to attract young jihadists. Zarqawists were especially brutal to Iraqi policemen and soldiers unwilling to abandon their posts. Weiss and Hassan contend the Islamic State improved on Zarqawi’s strategy by “relying on Iraqi and Syrian tribes to manage much of the savagery of jihadist rule themselves.” Weiss and Hassan, Army of Terror, 41-51.
[5] Giglio, 89.
[6] Giglio, 89.
[7] Giglio, 276.
[8] Emile Simpson, War From the Ground Up: Twenty-First-Century Combat as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[9] The Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Force is the most elite Iraqi special operations forces battalion. Giglio, Shatter, xii.
[10] U.S. Special Operations Command, “SOF Truths,” accessed March 5, 2020, https://www.socom.mil/about/sof-truths.
[11] Former Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly reflected on how almost 20 years of war has contributed to “cultural challenges that we are having in the special operations community.” As quoted in Matthew Cox, “Decades of Combat Led to SEAL Team Discipline Issues, Acting Navy Secretary Says,” Military.com, December 6, 2019, https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/12/06/decades-combat-led-seal-team-discipline-issues-acting-navy-secretary-says.html. See also U.S. Special Operations Command, United States Special Operations Command: Comprehensive Review (Tampa, FL: January 23, 2020), https://sof.news/pubs/USSOCOM-Comprehensive-Ethics-Review-Report-January-2020.pdf.
[12] Giglio, Shatter, 216.
[13] Giglio, 3, 184.
[14] The attack into eastern Mosul, comprised of three axes, started with Iraqi special operations forces, partnered with one coalition Special Operations Task Force, attacking from the east. The 16th Iraqi Army Division was attacking from the northeast but had stalled out. (The Federal Police were attacking on a third axis from the southeast but played a more marginal role.) As a result, a second coalition Special Operations Task Force was partnered with the 16th Iraqi Army Division to get them moving again, and the command level at which strikes could be approved was pushed down to the battalion level for those units with qualified personnel. These two decisions helped unlock the gridlock and build the momentum necessary to clear Mosul. Based on the reviewer’s personal experience.
[15] Mark Moyar, Oppose Any Foe: The Rise of America’s Special Operations Forces (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
[16] Giglio, 64.
[17] Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2016).
[18] Giglio, 8.
[19] Giglio, 263.
[20] Giglio, 210, 258.