By Alexander Perepechko

Published on March 7, 2016

From Organized Crime to Low Intensity Conflict? (continued)

In the period of Late Modernity, or even postmodernity, the clausewitzian trinity is still popular among American military-political leaders. In his seminal The Rise and Decline of the State, Israeli strategist Van Creveld summed up results of this approach over the last half-century for developed countries: “From France to the United States, there has scarcely been one “advanced” government in Europe and North America whose armed forces have not suffered defeat at the hands of underequipped, ill-trained, ill-organized, often even ill-clad, underfed, and illiterate freedom fighters or guerillas or terrorists; briefly, by men – and, often, women – who were short on everything except high courage and the determination to endure peacekeeping operations, and whatever other types of operations that were dreamt up by their masters” (2009: 395).

In two previous research essays we discovered that international jihadists find operational ground across the world by sponging off local leaders (often Salafists) and criminal groups. When I was working on this paper, new facts proved this finding.

Supported by the Russian Air Force, Syrian (also, Iranian and Lebanese) governmental ground troops squeezed out IS military units and moderate Syrian groups in several strategically important locations and significantly expanded a zone controlled by Damascus (Van Creveld, 2015). The area under ISIS control was reduced by one-third (Bidder et al, 2016). With Russia’s help, the regime of Assad might manage to reinstate control over all territories of the Syrian state. But even this development would not save the dictator from a demographic impasse. Assad understands that he and his Alawite minority cannot rule Syria without major changes. His first option is democratic elections and political power sharing mechanisms. The second option is tyrannical: Assad might use a depopulation strategy against Sunnis. In order to change the country’s demographics and create a religiously and ethnically homogenous Syria, the dictator might utilize a policy of cleansing through deportation, displacement, and killing of the Sunni population. Local Sunni communities that have supported anti-Assad fighters probably would be targeted first.

It is important to keep in mind that one of the main aims of recent Russian-Syrian military operations was to protect the largest gas facility in Syria, Tuweinan, located 60 miles southwest of Raqqa, de facto capital of the IS. It was built by Stroytransgaz, owned by the Russian billionaire Timchenko, a close associate of President Putin. This company used Hesco, a Syrian subcontractor, to do work in Syria. Last November, George Haswani, Hesco’s owner, who holds Russian and Syrian passports, was sanctioned by the Treasury Department of the United States for allegedly brokering oil sales between the IS and the Assad regime (Kenar & Soylu, 2016). Oil smuggling has played a decisive role in ISIL funding and now insurgents are losing this source.

More than 20,000 foreign fighters from more than 90 countries traveled to Iraq and Syria to fight for ISIS. Recently, about 3,500 international jihadists moved to Libya (Baumgärtner, 2015; Dinand, 2016; Protesters, 2016). According to the German UN Envoy Martin Kobler, “it (IS in Libya – AP) expands its sphere of influence from Sirte on the coast to the east, west and south. There are already bridgeheads and cells in the south, and if the Islamic State is allowed to join forces with terrorist organizations in Niger and Chad, then it will be very, very difficult to push it back. We are already now witnessing a closing of ranks of IS with criminal groups from sub-Saharan states that are controlling the human-trafficking business, which IS plays an increasing role in” (German UN, 2016).

At present, there are more signs of closer ties between the IS and Boko Haram, the militant Islamist group controlling the north-east of Nigeria and areas of Niger and Chad adjacent to Lake Chad (Oladipo, 2015) (Figure 20). Fatalities caused by these most deadly groups account for 60% of the deaths attributable to radical Islamists (Neumann, 2014: 15-16). At the moment, only the French military base Madama in the north of Niger, a few kilometers from the border with Libya, is located in the midst of contacts between jihadists in Libya and Boko Haram in Niger and Chad. But if the Islamic State in Libya (ISL) and Boko Haram manage to join forces, the world would have a new macro-regional terrorist hub similar to the one in the Middle East.

 

Figure 20. Geopolitics and geostrategy of Libya (Source: Generated by the author based on Baumgärtner, 2015; Dinard, 2016; Michailof, 2016; Protesters, 2016).

By now, international jihadists have penetrated 2 strategically important locations in Libya – the port of Sirte in the north and the Fezzan region in the south-west of Libya. The Sirte and Fezzan areas are no man’s lands between the pro-Islamist government in Tripoli and ex-Gaddafian anti-Islamist pro-western government in Tobruc (Figure 20). Fezzan is also a zone where the Tuareg and Tubu compete and sometimes fight to control illegal immigration, drug and arms trafficking, and oil smuggling. Jihadists appeal to Tuareg irredentism and try to recruit members of this tribe.

Ports of Western Africa are the eastern end of “Highway 10,” the 10th parallel north of the equator, the shortest route across the Atlantic, used by traffickers to smuggle Latin American cocaine destined mainly for Europe. From west African ports, cocaine goes through the areas of Nigeria, Chad, and Niger controlled by Boko Haram to Fezzan, Sirte, and finally to European ports.

Illegal immigrants come from the countries of the Sahel to Fezzan, Sirte, and lastly to Europe. The demographic transition has not yet happened in the Sahel and population growth reaches 4% per year. Drought, failure of agriculture, insecurity and political instability, unemployment, and the absence of investments force young people to leave for Europe. Boko Haram illegally receives arms from war zones in Chad, Niger, and Libya (Caulderwood, 2015; Michailof, 2016). Muammar Gaddafi knew how to control these flows but he is not around anymore… Today, more terrorists can enter Mediterranean ports in Europe. In many cases, it is more difficult to provide security in sea ports than in airports.

It is important that strongholds of the ISL are located in close proximity to the Sirte (north-east of Libya) and Murzuq (south-west of Libya) oil and natural gas basins (Figure 20). The arrival of experienced jihadists from Syria and Iraq allowed the ISL to capture oil installations in El Sider and Ras Lanuf (the Sirte basin) and oil fields El Feel and El Sharara (the Murzuq basin), which were controlled by guards of the federalists of Ibrahim Jadhran. According to Patrick Haimzadeh (2016), a former French diplomat stationed in Tripoli, jihadists want to render these installations unusable in order to exhaust Libya’s resources. These moves of the ISL prevent consolidation of the government of national unity and directly endanger the interests of at least 13 powerful foreign oil and natural gas companies from 8 western countries and 1 gas company from Russia (Table 3). Two or more of these companies are from the United States, Canada, France, Italy, and Spain, whose interests in Libya are at risk.

Table 3. Libya’s oil ports, fields, and refineries captured by ISL, 2016.

Load ports	Main fields	Refineries	Field operators	Lead foreign partners
El Sider (Sidra)	—	—	—	ConocoPhillips (US), Marathon (US), Hess (Germany)
Ras Lanuf	—	—	Wintershall (US), Harouje (Libya & Canada)	Wintershall (US), Gazprom (Russia), Suncor (PetroCanada)
—	—	Ras Lanuf	none	none
—	El Feel	—	Mellitah (Libya & Italy)	Eni (Italy)
—	El Sharara	—	Akakus (Libya, Spain & France)	Repsol (Spain), Total (France), OMV (Austria)

Source: Compiled by the author based on Dinand, 2016; Country Analysis, 2015; Militants attack, 2016; Protesters in Murzuq, 2016; Repsol in Libya, 2016.

Let us summarize our findings of this and the three previous posts.

Recall the Kurginyan matrix (Figure 13) in part 1 of “Securitization of post-heroic America. From organized crime to low intensity conflict and from the liberal state to the “post-modern” state?” This matrix was designed to compare 4 types of activities in the American state and society – legal activities, illegal activities, activities regulated by classified legal procedures, and illicit activities authorized by powers – before September 11, 2001 and today. By now, we have studied enough examples that explicitly or implicitly reveal an increase in illegal activities related to the conflict between the United States and the Middle East, between the western and Islamic civilizations.

1. With time, organizations other than the state – violent non-state actors – can also conduct war (Van Creveld, 1991: 198-212). Old war conventions, defining who may use violence against whom, for what ends, under what circumstances, in what ways, and by what means lose ground. Military and political elites are no longer in the privileged position to take full responsibility for the conduct of war. Ideologies are downgraded and economic profit motivations for war are highlighted. Insurgent groups, militia, gangs, special forces, and security organizations are booming. More civilians of all ages and sexes become immediate participants, targets, and victims of low-intensity conflicts (LICs) and conventional wars. Also, the state demotes its welfare obligations but does not offer citizens anything instead. To generate income, some people turn to illicit economic activities which thrive these days (Williams & Felbab-Brown, 2015). The state increases police forces to undertake anticrime operations and people involved in illicit activities might turn to insurgents for protection.

2. In the deadly conflict between radical Islam and the United States, it is hard to discern LIC from conventional war. However, this analysis reveals – and this is crucial – that organized crime (illegal activity) and LIC often coalesce and thus significantly expand the illegal domain in post-September 11 America. At the same time we have to keep in mind that some cultural, territorial, and socio-economic groups of population involved in LICs and certain illegal activities can regard these LICs and illegal activities as justifiable. Humans are not detached observers and in harsh life circumstances they might have no choice but to turn to illicit economic activity in order to meet basic human needs or turn to insurgents for protection. This causes enormous obstacles for any attempts to reduce the scope of crime and to stop LICs.

3. On American ground, radical Islamists promote organization and terrorism (Figure 21). Organization refers to the formation of active insurgent cells and passive support networks (see Searle, 2008). The Islamists foster terrorism to remove security from the population and to get revenge against the civilian population in order to reduce the strength of American military and security operations in the Middle East. In America, organization and terrorism – the 2 early operational phases of LIC – depend on patterns of Muslim resettlement, on local Salafist leaders and Salafist websites, and on local criminal groups. As the American strategist Phil Williams insightfully discerns, only in the early stages of LIC do we find cooperation between criminals and insurgents (Williams & Felbab-Brown, 2015). With gangs and jihadi groups operating in the same space, some kind of relationship is unavoidable. Fugitives and rebels often emerge from the same social milieu, know each other, and often trust each other. Co-located geographically, criminals and insurgents share an opportunity space and thus share an interest in limiting the power and reach of government forces. The organizational and terrorist phases of LIC, which are waged by Islamists against the American population, are often “moderately” violent. However with time the violence and frequency of attacks tend to increase.

Figure 21. Phases of low intensity conflict (Source: Searle, 2008).

4. The violence of Islamists is much higher in territorial operations in the Middle East and North Africa. In these parts of the world, the radicals created an “Islamic state” and foster guerrilla and mobile warfare operational phases of the LIC (see Searle, 2008) against the populations and sovereign states (e.g., Syria, Iraq, and Libya). The guerrilla phase is about small-unit operations, organization of the target population, propaganda, and clandestine replacement of governmental and social structures with the Islamist sharia. Mobile warfare is approaching conventional warfare in its level of violence. Islamists attempt to defeat regular Syrian and Iraqi forces on the ground. Islamist activities in these regions depend on alliances with local Sunni and ethnic minority leaders and on money from local illicit economies (oil smuggling, drug and arms trafficking, illegal immigration) run by local criminal groups (see Williams & Felbab-Brown, 2015).

In all probability, in the early stages of insurgency these alliances vary from market suppliers to tactical. Occasionally, strategic alliances between radicals and criminal organizations might happen in the later stages. However, in this case rebels risk to lose identity and legitimacy. Indeed Islamists fight for what they see as selfless goal: they use violence on behalf of religion and religious principles.

5. Radical Islamists do not have technical capabilities to symmetrically respond to the American strategy of offshore balancing, as described in an earlier research essay. We assume that in the Middle East, American military and security services wage a hybrid war against Islamists. According to the American strategist John McCuen (2008: 108), a hybrid war is a combination of traditional military operations against enemy military forces and targets with attempt to control the combat zone’s indigenous populations by securing and stabilizing them. Thus the American war in the Middle East only partially fulfill the requirements of a hybrid war. Indeed, the United States and its western allies fight the armed enemy in this macro-region from the sea, air, and space. This allows the Americans and their allies to avoid casualties but is not enough to control a much more complex medium – the land (see Van Creveld, 2013: 234). Delegating war on the ground to locals and foreigners can help to win support for the war on the home front and in the international community and to create a sense of legitimacy. At the same time, the “no American boots on the ground” policy denies the United States the option to counter-organize the indigenous population. Counter-organization calls for us to destroy embedded insurgent organizations by establishing better alternatives which should conform as much as possible to local customs (McCuen, 2008: 111). To do this, we need to better understand the human terrain. There are intense debates on this issue in the US Army and academic social sciences (Jaschik, 2015).

6. Cyberspace is one more medium where the United States fights radical Islam. Made by humans, this artificial medium is characterized by global connectivity, ubiquity, and mobility. Islamists skillfully use the components of this dense, constantly changing new medium: the Internet, telecommunication networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers. Created in the West, these technologies were and are crucial for globalization. Ironically, jihadists, mutants of the globalization of Islam, are now using these innovations against the declining western post-modernist state. Multibillion-dollar security services are waging cyberwar – sometimes successfully, sometimes not – against terrorist networks, websites, propaganda, recruiters, etc.

7. Middle-eastern opponents of the United States and its western allies cannot match the technological pre-eminence of the West. Asymmetric responses of insurgents in the form of terrorist attacks aim at safety and infrastructure. It is even more important that radical Islam targets our souls. I am afraid that the Islamists understand fairly well the physical and human terrain in the West in their war against us. In fact, insurgents target the demographic and socio-political fabric of our societies.

8. As we found out, our adversaries are well aware of and skillfully use the weaknesses of post-modernist societies and states. State multiculturalism leads to the situation in which involvement of the state in international conflict leads to LIC inside the state. And vice versa, internal social, political, religious, and ethnic conflicts in the multicultural state at some point manifest in the international arena (see Saghi, 2015). Globalization makes such developments nearly inevitable. For example, a significant number of the Ummat al-Islam (the Nation of Islam) people who have settled in North America and Europe have acquired concrete knowledge (an intimate relationship) of these macro-regions. Islamists easily reach and use these immigrants for terrorist objectives. The Islamists also make new converts to Islam and jihad. The regimes of Assad and Putin ignite spatial mobility of the Sunnis in Syria and direct illegal migrant flows of this population to Europe. An observer (von Rohr, 2016) noticed: “Russia doesn’t even shy away from conducting airstrikes on residential areas in Syria, bombing hospitals in the process. It is likewise forcing the Sunni population to take flight, thereby increasing the flow of refugees and destabilizing Europe and Turkey. It has become obvious that Russia is not a partner to the West, not even, as some had hoped, in fighting the Islamic State. On the contrary, Russia has become a destructive actor”.

9. We often – perhaps too often – fail to fully understand the human terrain in combat zones in the Middle East. Our technologically superior weapon systems and the ways we choose to use them do not transform the demographic and socio-political fabric of Islamic civilization. The Ummat al-Islam in the United States includes about 2,500,000 Muslims (Table 4). This represents approximately 0.78% of the population of the United States. The density of Muslims per in this country is 0.25. For radical Islamists these Muslims in North America and Europe are human sensors and tools to take advantage of… How this can be countered?

10. We need to have our human sensors on the ground in the Middle East. Yes, we have friends and paid informers in the local populations… What is the role of American expatriates in the Muslim Middle East? Can they be seen as a potential “symmetrical offset,” at least partially, against the Muslim population in the United States? The numbers pertaining to American expatriates in the Middle East and Muslims in the United States are as follows:

These numbers do not look encouraging. Also, Muslims on the streets (many underemployed), in small shops, markets, and cafés in America, on the one hand, and well paid American expatriates in quiet offices and exclusive residential areas in the Middle East, on the other hand, are the two very different groups of human sensors. Nevertheless these groups deserve the highest attention of military, security, and social science professionals. Assessment of geopolitical and demographic factors in LIC and violent criminal activities is as important as an evaluation of the manpower (total population, available manpower, fitness for service, number reaching military age annually, active frontline personnel, and active reserve personnel) and geographical factors (land area, coastline, shared borders, and waterways) in conventional war. Without our human sensors on the ground, Americans are doomed to be limited to abstract knowledge about the land in the Middle East, provided by satellites, drones, and other technical sensors. Modern counterinsurgency by signal and image intelligence, supplemented only by deserters and paid informers, does not win the support of the civilian population in the Middle East. As a result, the Americans do not obtain concrete knowledge about the land this population lives on.

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