Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
February 9, 2015
Estimates of the number of fighters in the ranks of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are extraordinarily wide-ranging. On the low end of things, CNN’s Barbara Starr recently reported that “U.S. intelligence estimates that ISIL has a total force of somewhere between 9,000 to 18,000 fighters.” In late 2014, the CIA’s estimate of ISIL’s numbers was slightly higher, as its analysts assessed that the group had between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters between its Iraq and Syria holdings.
Other estimates are far higher. Rami Abdel Rahman, the director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, has said that ISIL has more than50,000 fighters in Syria alone. The chief of the Russian General Staff recently said that Russia estimates ISIL to have “70,000 gunmen of various nationalities.” In late August of 2014, Baghdad-based security expert Hisham al-Hashimi claimed that ISIL’s total membership could be close to 100,000. By November, Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff to Kurdish president Massoud Barzani, told Patrick Cockburn of The Independent that the CIA’s estimates were far too low, and that ISIL had at least 200,000 fighters.
Given this range of estimates, questions naturally arise: Who is right? Which estimate is closest to ISIL’s true numbers? To assess these questions, it’s necessary to consider which parts of ISIL’s force the estimates are attempting to count, the total amount of territory ISIL is occupying, and the attrition that coalition forces have inflicted upon ISIL. Bearing in mind all of these factors, it becomes clear not only that the high-end figures are plausible, but also that they are far more likely than the unrealistically low numbers propounded by U.S. intelligence.
The figure of 200,000 ISIL fighters advanced by Fuad Hussein includes support personnel (ansar), police-style security forces (hisba), local militias, border guards, paramilitary personnel associated with the group’s various security bodies (mukhabarat, assas, amniyat, and amn al-khas), and conscripts and trainees. The actual number of ISIL front-line and garrison fighters is much lower, which are divided between their regular forces (jund), the elite paramilitary (inghimasiyun, which alone may have up to 15,000 members), and death squad (dhabbihah) personnel. Unless one is able to objectively evaluate these bodies, merely throwing out raw numbers is meaningless.
Turning to ISIL’s holdings, it’s worth reviewing the territories that ISIL is believed to occupy in Syria, along with their population sizes:
Raqqa province (population 944,000)
Dayr al-Zawr province, not including Dayr al-Zawr City (746,566)
Shaddadi, Markada, and al-Arish districts of Hasaka (90,095)
Jarabulus and Manbij districts of Aleppo (467,032)
This totals a population of 2,247,693 in Syria alone for ISIL to administer, while both imposing extreme Islamic rule and sustaining large-scale offensive operations elsewhere. For comparison, in Afghanistan it took Regional Command Southwest around 30,000 U.S., U.K. and Danish troops to attempt to subdue Helmand and Nimruz, which have a combined population of 1,598,369. Further, these coalition forces had the help of the Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police, the Afghan Community Order Police, and the National Directorate of Security, meaning that the total forces on their side were far more than 30,000. Even accounting for terrain and infrastructural differences, and the fact that ISIL does not possess the long tail of modern Western forces (i.e., the logistics necessary to sustain a modern fighting force, technological specialists, and a vast intelligence infrastructure), ISIL would still need, at minimum, a comparable force of around 30,000 just to maintain their Syria-based holdings.
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