The American diplomat Brett
McGurk is the
central player in the seventy-two-nation coalition fighting the Islamic
State, a disparate array of countries twice the size of NATO. He has now
worked all of America’s major wars against extremism—in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Syria—under three very different Presidents: George W. Bush,
Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump. McGurk served in Baghdad after the
ouster of Saddam Hussein; he used his experience clerking for the late
Chief Justice William Rehnquist on the Supreme Court to help draft
Iraq’s new constitution. President Bush brought McGurk back to
Washington to serve on the National Security Council and help run the
campaign against Al Qaeda. President Obama tapped him to work Iraq and
Iran at the State Department. McGurk was visiting Kurdistan, in northern
Iraq, when ISIS seized nearby Mosul. In 2015, he became Special
Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS. President
Trump kept him on.

In a sign of how fast the Islamic State is shrinking, McGurk last month visited northern Syria. I called on him Wednesday, at his small
whitewashed office on the ground floor of the State Department, to
assess the future of ISIS and the world’s most unconventional nation.
McGurk is an optimist, long-term, despite the chorus of skeptics in
Washington about extremism, Iraq and Syria, and U.S. foreign policy in
the volatile Middle East. The interview has been edited and condensed.
McGurk’s most chilling answer was when he talked about how many ISIS fighters are still alive.

Where is ISIS? The leaders? The fighters? Intelligence assessments
claim that at least twenty per cent of the fighters have returned to
their countries of origin, with some exceptions like Britain, where it
may be as high as fifty per cent. Where are they going as they face
defeat?

We had forty thousand foreign fighters come into Syria from over a
hundred and ten countries, as far away as China. The reason Mosul was so
difficult in the final three weeks of battle was because we had hundreds
of foreign fighters in the Old City barricaded in civilian structures.
Our guys could hear them on the radio speaking Chinese, Russian, Dutch,
French.

Did some foreign fighters get out before we had the borders sealed? Yes.
Now it is extremely difficult. Foreign fighters who are in Iraq and
Syria are going to die in Iraq and Syria. Mosul is now finished. Raqqa
is surrounded.

[The American-backed] Syrian Democratic Forces have cleared about
forty per cent of the city. [ISIS fighters] are concentrating now in
small towns along a little span of the Euphrates River that crisscrosses
the Iraq and Syria border in the middle of nowhere. These guys used to plan
major attacks in Raqqa, with the infrastructure of a city, and then send
teams to conduct attacks in Paris and Brussels. They can’t do that
anymore.

How many ISIS fighters are still active? And where?

Our experts think the active cadre of ISIS fighters is down to twelve
thousand total fighters, local and foreign. The Syrian Democratic
Forces, the force we are working with, is incredibly brave. They are
going into these high-rise buildings, room by room, floor by floor, to
root these guys out.

Is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS caliph, alive? And what is he
doing?

This is someone who cannot show his face. He communicates by audiotapes,
like we are back in the nineteen-nineties. He has dramatically tainted
his claim to any legitimacy. Whether or not he is alive, we do not know.
But his command and control over this organization is severed.

What is the U.S. military role after the caliphate collapses?

Our coalition has trained a hundred thousand members of the Iraqi
security force that had collapsed in 2014. They have now fought some of
the most difficult battles since the Second World War. We are in
discussions with the Iraqi government about a future role for the
coalition training and advising. In Syria, we have also pioneered this
model of working by, with, and through local forces. It’s local Syrians
retaking their areas. Our footprint is small, it’s light, but it is
effective. We will want to be able to keep the pressure so that ISIS can’t regenerate.

So air strikes will continue?

If we see an ISIS leader or something, we will retain the right. In this
campaign, coalition-enabled operations have cleared out a total of sixty
thousand square kilometres [roughly twenty-three thousand square
miles]. We liberated almost five million people. ISIS has not retaken a
single square kilometre. This is not the day when you go clear, but
can’t hold, and the enemy comes back. The model that we are using
appears to be sustainable.

So, is ISIS going to come back? They’ll always be around as small
terrorist cells. We want to make sure the Iraqis are able to handle
that. But in terms of ISIS being able to regenerate as a force that can
take and seize territory as it could in 2014, I just don’t think they’ll
ever retain that capability.

Fourteen years after the U.S. intervention, in 2003, Iraq still does
not have a political deal to share power among sectarian and ethnic
factions. How does Iraq solve an issue as important to the future of the
country as the military campaign?

I resist the notion that because there wasn’t some political deal in
Baghdad, the Sunnis decided to put their lot with ISIS. That is
simplistic. ISIS came into Sunni areas and anyone who didn’t agree with
their twisted vision was murdered. Sunnis were the largest victims of
ISIS.

The government of Iraq has a policy of decentralization, empowering
people at the local level to restore life to their communities. Iraq
will have an election, probably in May of next year. The divisions in
Iraqi society now are not so much Sunni-Shia. There are big divisions
among the different Shia groups and inter-Sunni. Frankly, some Sunni
tribes sided with ISIS in 2014. In these communities, there isn’t a
get-out-of-jail-free card.

There have been a lot of revenge killings.

Probably not as many as had been predicted, but yes. It’s impossible to
have a totally clean aftermath.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said that the Popular
Mobilization Forces, predominantly Shiite militias, weren’t allowed in
Mosul, but I saw their pickup trucks—with big flags waving sayings from
the Quran—all over town. How much of a concern is the unleashing of the
P.M.F., now and down the road?

The P.M.F. arose from a fatwa issued by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani
in the worst days of 2014, when it looked like Baghdad could fall. He
issued a fatwa for able-bodied males to help save the country. About
eighty per cent have proved to be quite disciplined; they operate under
control of the state. About twenty per cent of them are not. That
includes some Shia militia groups. It also includes some Sunni groups
that have discipline problems. Given the terrain that Iraq had to cover
during the Mosul campaign, there was some necessity for the Popular
Mobilization Forces. This is an issue that the Iraqi government has to
get its arms around.

Since 2003, Iran has played an increasing role in Iraq. How do you
assess their intentions down the road and their power compared to the
U.S.?

Iran likes to be flattered with the view that everything that happens in
Iraq and Syria happens because Iran is pulling the strings. That’s just
not true. Do they have enormous influence? Yes. Just look at a map and
you can understand why. But the differences, even within the Shia
community in Iraq and the Shia community in Iran, are profound. The
vision of [Iraq’s] Grand Ayatollah Sistani —of quietism and a civil
state, meaning not a state governed by clerics—is totally different from
the vision of [Iran’s] Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The Iranians tried
to do a number of things in Iraq that simply have not worked, because
the Iraqis rejected it. Their influence is not dominant. I never
discount the ability of the Iraqis to chart their own course.

Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold over Idlib, the last Syrian
province beyond the regime’s control. How worried are you about Al
Qaeda’s rise in the jihadi world as ISIS is collapsing?

I’m very concerned about Idlib. Trends apparent for some time culminated
over the last couple of weeks, with the dominant Al Qaeda movement taking
the main border crossings and populated areas. We have to make sure Al
Qaeda-linked fighters cannot get in and out. We are going to have to
work with the Turks and others to degrade this presence. This
is not something that’s spreading. But, within Idlib, Al Qaeda is
working hard to take the reins of power.

Raqqa is the caliphate’s capital. Who rules it after the defeat of
ISIS? Is it like Mosul, returning to government control—President Bashar
al-Assad—or is it like Berlin, where different forces vie for control of
its future and territory?

As complex as Mosul is, Raqqa is more complex. There’s a Raqqa Civilian
Council that we’re working with in Ayn Issa, about forty kilometres or
so north. The council is a group of Syrians from the area. They’ve
already committed to an election in Raqqa no later than next May. The
process is well laid out. There are fifty thousand civilians in Raqqa
right now, plus about two hundred and fifty thousand displaced people,
so the scale is nowhere near Mosul. The long-term settlement of the
Syrian civil war is a more distant issue.

Technically, the Assad government can reclaim control of Raqqa?

Connections between Damascus and opposition areas—in terms of paying
teachers’ salaries, paying doctors—never completely went away, even in
hard-core opposition areas. But people there are going to have some say,
and the Syrians I have met in that area do not want the regime to come
back before you have a settlement to the over-all civil war. That would
breed quite a bit of resistance.

The phase we’re in right now: defeat ISIS; eliminate the caliphate; and,
in parallel, work to de-escalate the over-all civil war through
de-escalation areas—the agreement just worked out with Russia in the
south, which President Putin and President Trump finalized, it is
holding. Two and a half weeks into that ceasefire, fighting has really
stopped. So defeat ISIS, de-escalate the over-all civil war, then set the
conditions for a realistic discussion of a political settlement.

What about jihadism down the road?

This is not a battle led by the United States. ISIS is a threat to Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, the U.A.E., to all of our Muslim partners. We have found
over the last year a real seriousness to take on this ideological
battle.

But by autocratic governments and the countries that gave us the
ideology in the first place.

When we started, in 2014, ISIS propaganda outnumbered anti-ISIS propaganda six to one [online]. That ratio’s now reversed. Twitter’s
taken off hundreds of thousands of pro-ISIS handles. This is a
multifaceted effort not just with governments. It is private sector, it
is religious, it is civil society. What law-enforcement people need is
information. If we get a phone off the battlefield, or a notebook, or an
address book, we are able to vet and verify names, and we have now built
a database of nineteen thousand names of known foreign fighters who have
tried to join or are affiliated with ISIS [or its sympathizers]. We
share that with host nations, and they share it with Interpol.

The nineteen thousand fighters, affiliates, and sympathizers—do we
believe they are still alive, or are many of them dead?

Most of them are alive.