Photo: Fighters from ISIS stand guard at a checkpoint in the northern Iraq city of Mosul. (Reuters)
ISIS's stated aim is the revival of a caliphate - a Sunni super state that would collapse the colonial-era boundaries between Syria and upper and western Iraq. But even if they are defeated, the tribal and sectarian forces that bedevil the Middle East's modern state system will remain, writes Matthew Dal Santo.
With ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, still threatening Baghdad, Iraq appears to be sliding back to a state of civil war. But ISIS is far from a terrorist organisation like the rest. What does its advance say about the long-term evolution of the geopolitics of the Middle East?
According to my Bedouin guide, world history knew three great figures in addition to the Prophet Muhammad: American President George W Bush (whom he despised); Napoleon, emperor of the French (whom he admired); and the Roman Emperor Justinian (whom he revered). He was 16 years old and helping me down the side of Mount Sinai as night closed in above the fabled monastery of St Catherine, where Moses reputedly beheld the Burning Bush.
We talked about science, religion and politics. It was November 2010 and, in Egypt at least, the protests that would build into the 'Arab Spring' were yet to gather.
Four years later, with Syria engulfed in fighting and ISIS's Sunni rebels in pursuit of a revived caliphate stretching from Aleppo to the doorstep of Baghdad, I better appreciate his chronology's simple elegance.
Justinian (527-65) was among the last to rule over a Christian Eastern Mediterranean, from Constantinople to Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria; across the Euphrates, the Zoroastrian kings of Persia dominated from the baking plains of Mesopotamia deep into Central Asia.
Muhammad, whose revolutionary teachings would transform this world, was born shortly after. Dissolving the Euphrates barrier, his successors would build a caliphate from Spain to the Hindu Kush. With famed capitals first at Damascus, then at Baghdad, it would unite the whole Middle East under a single ruler for the first time since Alexander some 900 years before.
There at Sinai, Justinian's fame was easy to understand. He had, my guide said, entrusted the monks to the keeping of his tribe. He wasn't exactly sure when, but it was before Napoleon. I had heard about the legend before, as I had of the decree the Prophet had himself signed, instructing his followers to leave the monastery's Christian occupants unharmed. The monks guarded it jealously.
The French emperor, by contrast, was a parvenu. I could only guess at why he loomed so large in my guide's mind.
Photo: Napoleon marked the start of the colonial and neo-colonial meddling that had followed him. (National Gallery of Victoria: Napoleon Revolution to Empire)
Napoleon's expedition to Egypt had been brief and, strategically, a disaster. Arriving in July 1798 with a force of 40,000 Frenchmen, he planned an Egyptian empire that would make France a global power. A month later, Nelson sank the French fleet. His dream ruined, Napoleon slipped back to France to march the Grande Armée from one end of Europe to the other.
Napoleon was nonetheless the first to see in Egypt - then a restive, semi-autonomous governorate among the Ottoman lands of the Middle East - a launching pad against British India. London woke to the strategic value of the Middle East. And fears of another European power - France or Russia - dominating the region would drive British policy for the next 150 years. When the First World War eliminated the Ottomans, it would culminate in the rash of originally British-and French-sponsored states that populate the region today.
In 1917, Britain had promised the hereditary Sunni keepers of Mecca and Medina an independent Arab kingdom, a 'Greater Syria'. But at almost every stage in the drawing of the region's modern borders, their wishes were subordinated to the greater interests of empire and the satisfaction of conflicting war-time alliances with the French and Zionist Jews.
Where for centuries great, regional empires (Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, Safavid and Qajar Persia, Seljuk and Ottoman Turkey) had dominated the Middle East, there suddenly emerged a system of artificial nation states that corresponded in no way to the region's tribal loyalties, sectarian identities and mental geography.
But in a place of such mixing - Sunni, Shia, Christian, Jew, Druze and other religions and sub-groups besides - how could it?
Perhaps, then, in my young guide's mind, Napoleon stood for all the colonial and neo-colonial meddling that had followed him: the drawing and redrawing of borders by Britain and France; and, after the Second World War, the protective mantle of American alliances, alternately prized and resented. And under George W Bush, direct Western domination returned to Iraq.
But Obama's abrupt termination of the American operations there in 2011, determination not to be drawn into the Syrian Civil War, and reluctance now to send more than a training mission to bolster Iraq's scattered armed forces following the fall of Mosul to ISIS suggest that the will even to defend this originally Western-designed Middle Eastern order may tacitly be crumbling.
What will take its place?
ISIS's stated aim is the revival of a caliphate stretching from the Mediterranean to the Zagros - a Sunni super state that would collapse the colonial-era boundaries between Syria and upper and western Iraq. Its effect, if not its aim, would be the unravelling of the Western-imposed order that has organised this part of the Middle East since the end of the Ottomans.
Explained: What is ISIS?
With an estimated wealth of some $200-400m and the American weaponry left behind by the fleeing Iraqi army, it's already a terrorist group like no other.
Mr Obama has ruled out land troops and, so far, airstrikes. But if ISIS continues its push, he will be forced to send more than the few hundred American advisers on their way to Baghdad. If America doesn't act, Iran will.
Even if ISIS is defeated, in Syria and Iraq the tribal and sectarian forces that bedevil the Middle East's modern state system will remain. While Iraq's great rivers flow down from (mostly) Sunni northern Syria, at their delta in the Gulf they meet the mountains of (mainly) Shia Iran. Though no Middle Eastern state is monolithic, few are as mixed Sunni and Shia as these lands which, a few decades after Muhammad's death, witnessed the defining early battles between them.
As some analysts have pointed out, a specifically Sunni State of Syria and Iraq has never existed; it won't easily be created.
Where the desert carves the great bow out of the Fertile Crescent, Greater Syria has always been the region's uneasy fulcrum. Linking the world of Egypt and Arabia to the Taurus and the mountainous Iranian plateau of the Zagros in the north, for centuries it's been a transit route for trade and a battleground of empires. The Old Testament depicts an Israel caught here between Pharaoh to the south and Hittites, Assyrians or Medes to the north: long before it was a term of eschatology, Armageddon was the name of a great regional battle.
The 'House of War' is sometimes said to designate those lands not yet the home of Islam. If ISIS has its way, it may soon become a better description of its heartland.
Matthew Dal Santo is a freelance writer and foreign affairs correspondent. He previously worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. View his full profile here.
Just two years after the withdrawal of US troops, Iraq has again been plunged into sectarian-fuelled violence and chaos.
Terrorist group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) has routed the Iraqi army in the north of the country and seized the country's second largest city.
The country, which was invaded by a coalition led by the US in 2003, has been riven along religious and ethnic lines for the past decade and faces an uncertain future.
At the heart of the conflict is distrust between the two branches of Islam in the country - Sunni and Shia - a divide replicated throughout the Middle East.
ISIS fighting for a new 'House of War' - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
