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Latest Isis advances say more about weakness of state than jihadis' strength
Terror group faced little resistance from local forces in Palmyra and Ramadi, prompting re-evaluations across a region that had sensed it might be in retreat
Islamic State fighters are celebrating their second major conquest in a week in Syria and Iraq as they pick through the ruins of the historic city of Palmyra.
The sudden advance of the militants into the UN heritage site in central Syriaresulted in the rout of a national army, the exodus of refugees and a fresh pulse of regional alarm at the resilience of the self-styled caliphate force.
The UN said one-third of Palmyra’s 200,000-strong population had fled. And Isis militants used social media to show themselves posing amid ancient columns in Palmyra on Thursday. Other images displayed a more familiar theme: the summary slaughter of local men whose blood drenched the road.
Isis’s latest advance has prompted a re-evaluation across the region, which had earlier sensed it might be in retreat. From Beirut to Baghdad and as far away as Riyadh, regional actors are coming to terms with an organisation that can win most of its battles and successfully storm Syria and Iraq’s best-defended bastions.
The seizure of Palmyra followed the equally startling conquest of Ramadi in Iraq’s Anbar province last weekend. Both operations, around 600 miles apart, have become emblematic of a terror group that can have its way across two crumbling countries despite embattled state forces being propped up by global powers.
In Syria, forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad had committed to defend gas fields to the north of Palmyra that are essential to the nation’s electricity supply. The ruins themselves, as well as being enduring testaments to the country’s diverse past, are central to the pluralistic image conveyed by the modern state. Both sites are strategic, yet they fell in less than four days – with elite army units unwilling and unable to defend them.
Ramadi in Iraq, meanwhile, had been a holdout in the heart of the country’s most hostile province – a place where local Sunni leaders allied with the Shia-led government and its militia proxies to keep Isis at bay.
That too changed in less than 72 hours of clashes, where top-tier troops and tribes posed little resistance. In both cases, once the battles started going badly, state forces surrendered the cities to their fate, leaving large amounts of ammunition behind.
“They wanted to defend this area,” said a government official who fled Palmyra for Damascus on Thursday. “They even tried to. But if that’s the best that they can do when they try, then the country is lost.”
Officials who had fled Palmyra said jets from the US-led coalition that had bombed Isis targets elsewhere in the country had not joined the fight. US jets were instrumental in expelling the terror group from the two cities it has lost so far, Kobani, in Syria’s north, and Tikrit, in central Iraq.