International Organizations and The Rise of ISIL

Global Responses to Human Security Threats

Daniel Silander,Don Wallace,John Janzekovic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315536071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Sicurezza nazionale

This book seeks to understand the obligations of the international community to promote and protect state and human security in situations of international humanitarian crises.

In Iraq and Syria, as well as in neighbouring states, the rise of ISIL has raised serious state and human security challenges. This study explores the relationships between the Global-Regional Partnership, the United Nations and nine organizations in their attempt to deal with the challenges presented by ISIL. Each organization is analyzed in terms of how it has responded in the past and how it is now responding to the ISIL threat based on three perspectives; resource capacities (military, political, economic, technological, normative); willingness and readiness; and impediments to capacity and abilities. The overall aim is to discern what capacities and abilities international organizations have to protect state and human security and prevent civilians from mass atrocities inflicted by ISIL forces. The study addresses the role of international organizations when the UNSC is unable or unwilling to uphold the most fundamental norms and values in the UN Charter. This approach acknowledges that within the international community there is an overall acceptance on security for a partnership between the UN and regional organizations, but that there is also a contested call for a renegotiated international contract on state and human security.

This volume will be of much interest to students of international relations, human rights, peace and conflict studies, terrorism studies and International Relations.

1
Introduction

ISIL and international responses on security

Daniel Silander, John Janzekovic, and Don Wallace

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has to a significant extent destroyed state and human security in significant areas of both Iraq and Syria, seriously jeopardizing regional and international peace and stability as a consequence. The brutality and the speed at which these fundamentalist jihadists have overwhelmed opposing forces have shocked and appalled the international community. Today, the concern is not just about the future of Iraq and Syria because ISIL is spreading its violence and messages of hatred much further afield. The ISIL bomb on the Russian Metrojet Flight 9268, exploding over the Sinai Peninsula in late October 2015 and killing 224 people, and only weeks later the ISIL attacks on civilians in Beirut and Paris, murdering and injuring hundreds of civilians, presented signs of an escalating wave of violence. The United Nations (UN) has repeatedly condemned ISIL and called upon the international community to launch “concentrated and coordinated actions” (International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect, 2015) to eliminate ISIL in order to stop war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and other mass atrocities.

This book explores a vital part of the international community from the perspective of nine international organizations that together comprise a majority of all states in the world. The international community consists of numerous global and regional actors, but our focus is on the capacities and abilities at the international organizational level to respond to the atrocities of ISIL. In this exploration the overall question will be: what capacities and abilities do major and strategically important international organizations have to protect state and human security and to prevent civilians from mass atrocities inflicted by ISIL forces?

The organizations selected to be studied in this book are: the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the European Union (EU), the G Family (G7/8/20), the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the International Criminal Court (ICC), the League of Arab States (LAS), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Each organization is analyzed in terms of how it has responded in the recent past and how it is responding now to the ISIL threat based on three perspectives: resource capacities (military, political, economic, technological, and normative); willingness and readiness abilities (moving from words to action); and impediments to capacity and abilities.

The increasing international interest in the response capacities and abilities of international organizations or coalitions of concerned states evolved in part from UN appeals to the international community to act against ISIL. There is a clear and present danger from ISIL, and international organizations have a crucial role in which to address this threat. Such organizations have enormous potential capacities to act together but also to partner with the UN on global security, including state and human security. In addition, they have a crucial role and contribution to make to support the fundamentals of Responsibility to Protect. R2P is, to a significant extent, about institutional responses by entities external to an affected nation-state. This study addresses the role of international organizations to provide security when the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is unable or unwilling to uphold the most fundamental norms and values in the UN Charter. It is from this perspective that this study sees an important role for international organizations in the goal of enhancing state and human security and the concomitant responsibilities articulated under the principles of R2P.

This introductory chapter examines the threats and crimes of ISIL on state and human security, and the responses of the UN and the general role of international organizations in the promotion of R2P principles. The chapter concludes with an elaboration on the overall aim and structure of the study. Subsequent chapters provide in-depth discussions regarding the rise of ISIL (Chapter 2), assessments of capacities, abilities and actions of nine international organizations regarding ISIL (Chapters 3–11) and concluding observations, remarks and discussion on prospective proposals (Chapter 12).

The threats and crimes of ISIL

In a few years, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS), the Islamic State (IS) or, as referred to in Arabic, ad-Dawlat al-Islāmiyah fī al-ʿIrāq wa sh-Shām (DAESH) have all but demolished security in vast parts of Iraq and Syria (see Cockburn, 2015; Sekulow et al., 2014; Weiss & Hassan, 2015). Since 2012, most English-language news and other media agencies have used the term Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The UN and the US State Department are now referring to them as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL (Tharoor, 2014). For consistency and where appropriate, this book uses the term the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to refer to this extremely violent jihadist movement led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.¹

In August 2011, ISIL conquered a number of Sunni-majority areas in Syria and by 2014 had expanded its geographic control within the governorates of Ar-Raqqah, Idlib, Deir ez-Zor and Aleppo. ISIL actions and influence quickly spread into the north and north-east regions of Iraq. It supported affiliates in Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East, as well as in North Africa, West Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. ISIL successfully conquered major western cities in Iraq in 2014 and launched military raids in Syria against both sides of the civil war. Fierce battles took place in and around the city of Kobane on the border of Iraq and Turkey, resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people (Tomlinson, 2015). On June 29, 2014, ISIL announced a global caliphate under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, based on fundamentalist interpretations of Sharia law (al-Jazeera, 2014). Al-Baghdadi is conducting a declared religious war targeting any state, group, or individual that does not fully adhere to all the severe requirements of his interpretation of an extremist Islamist code. ISIL has systematically promoted its political and religious objectives and used social media to show the international community how enemies (anyone who does not strictly submit to its fundamentalist doctrines) are executed in gruesome fashion. In the summer of 2015, ISIL seemed to have consolidated its power in the northern and eastern parts of Syria, in al-Hajar al-Aswad in the southern parts of Damascus, and in the region of Ghuta, east of Damascus. Reports of its presence in Damascus, the capital of Syria, were also presented. Accurate data on ISIL’s geographical expansion in Iraq and Syria has been difficult to obtain, but most observers claim that by 2015, the movement was in control of a territory with about 6.5 million people.

In March 2015, UN human rights investigators characterized the actions of ISIL, committed against the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq, as crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. The UN presented evidence that the ISIL forces deliberately targeted the minority group to end its existence (Cumming-Bruce, 2015). In Mosul and the Nineveh province in Iraq, witnesses reported that in August 2014 ISIL forces invaded villages, executed boys and men, and kidnapped young women and girls to be sex-slaves. The UN accused ISIL of murder, torture, rape, and kidnap, not only of the Yazidi minority, but also Christians, Kurds, Shia, and Turkmens (Svenska Dagbladet, 2015). Amnesty International (AI) also reported ongoing and systematic sexual abuse and gang-rapes of Yazidi girls and women. Many females have been captured by ISIL and are imprisoned and sexually abused on a daily basis. Investigations by AI revealed that some young women ended their own lives because of the fear of being captured by ISIL forces (Amnesty International, 2013; 2014). AI defined ISIL activities as ethnic cleansing (Brett, 2014) and, in a December 2013 briefing, accused ISIL of war crimes. AI stated that “ISIL forces have committed numerous serious rights abuses, including some that amount to war crimes; they include abductions, arbitrary detention, torture and other ill-treatment, and unlawful killings” (Amnesty International, 2013).

On October 10, 2014, the UN Special Advisers on the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect issued a joint statement calling on regional and global actors to take “concentrated and coordinated action . . . to ensure the protection of the populations and avert the possibility of further atrocity crimes” (International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect, 2015). In February of 2015, the Director-General of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) expressed international outrage at the destruction carried out by ISIL militants against the ancient cultural heritage sites in Syria and Iraq, characterizing the devastation as cultural cleansing. Such deliberate destruction was deemed to be a war crime under the ICC’s Rome Statute. The UNSC had just two weeks earlier adopted a resolution banning all trade in looted antiquities from this region (UN News Centre, 2015).

The UN has vigorously condemned ISIL for its systematic and barbaric actions against both state and human security, and on August 15, 2014, the UNSC unanimously adopted Resolution 2170 Condemning Gross, Widespread Abuse of Human Rights by Extremist Groups in Iraq and Syria (UNSC Res. 2170, 2014). Based on Chapter VII of the charter, the UNSC called upon the international community to place sanctions on ISIL leaders and place them on the terrorist sanction list in order to stop the influx of a growing number of foreign fighters. This action would assist in freezing the assets, financing and arming of ISIL and the various groups flocking to its Black Flag. The UNSC also demanded an immediate disarmament and disbandment of all illegal forces and warned ISIL about conducting atrocities that could be defined as crimes against humanity. The UNSC declared that all perpetrators of war crimes and other atrocities would be brought to justice and that further UNSC measures would be imposed to counter the dire security threat posed by ISIL (UNSC Res. 2170, 2014). On November 20, 2015, the UNSC unanimously adopted a resolution that declared the ISIL’s terrorist attacks to be “a global and unprecedented threat to international peace and security,” following the “horrifying terrorist attacks” it perpetrated at the end of 2015 in Sousse (Tunisia), Ankara (Turkey), over Sinai (Egypt) with the downing of a Russian plane, and in Beirut and Paris. The resolution further stated that,

By its violent extremist ideology, its terrorist acts, its continued gross systematic and widespread attacks directed against civilians, abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law, including those driven on religious or ethnic ground, its eradication of cultural heritage and trafficking of cultural property . . . [ISIL constitutes] a global and unprecedented threat to international peace and security.

(UN News Centre, 2015)

State and human security

The threat posed by ISIL implicates both state and human security. The notion of state security and state-security challenges is inherent in the debate on international politics (Bull, 1977; Morgenthau, 1978; Waltz, 1979, 2001). International politics has traditionally treated state security as survival from attacks by another state’s forces, and states have been perceived as key actors on the international scene with the overall objective of securing their own survival. Survival has, in an anarchic setting of other states and without a hierarchy of authorities, been secured foremost militarily but also through economic, political, and cultural dominance. The more such capacities a state might have, the more power and leverage it has to impose its foreign policy objectives on others (Collins, 2007; Krasner, 2001; Merritt, 1976; Waltz, 1979, 2001).

First, state security has long been protected by the premise of the UN Charter. The charter sets out the sovereign equality of states (UN Article 2.1), the territorial integrity of each state (UN Article 2.4) and the nonintervention principle (UN Article 2.7). These provisions in Article 2 consolidate the institutionalized principles of state sovereignty and nonintervention in international politics, and they have been the guiding principles for the development of the modern international system of sovereign states. The UN Charter also addresses the functionality of the UN to uphold these principles in the international system of states. The primary function of the UN as the organizational representative of sovereign states is to attempt to solve state disputes and to maintain international peace and order (UN Article 1.1). Other international coalitions, institutions and organizations are also built on the cooperative capacities between states regionally or globally and provide for international laws, treaties, declarations, and conventions (UN, 1945; Janzekovic & Silander, 2013).

State security relies on the right of self-defense, and the UN Charter articulates the processes required to maintain or restore peace and good order among states. Such processes may be of an economic and diplomatic nature (UN Article 41 and 42) or of a military nature (UN Article 43). The charter asserts that the principle of self-defense is the inherent sovereign right of a state and that it may be implemented either individually by the state or in coalition with others under the umbrella of collective self-defense. When a UN member state is attacked, the UNSC is required to act but, until such actions are in place, the attacked state has the right to choose individual or collective self-defense (UN, 1945).

Second, the UN Charter does not just define security in terms of state security because it acknowledges the accompanying need to ensure human security. In addition to maintaining international security and peace, Article 1 of the Charter states that a function of the UN is to “achieve international cooperation . . . in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all. . . .” This does not provide a system of protection enforcement for human security; however, the UN has presented principles and measures to protect human security as an embedded part of state security. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and the two 1966 International Covenants, on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and on Civil and Political Rights have strengthened human security as constituting human rights and freedoms in the world.

Beginning in the 1990s, various UN Secretaries-General argued for a reorientation of our perceptions on security by stating that human security is a precondition to state security (Annan, 1999). Javier Perez de Cuellar (1982–1991), Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1992–1996), Kofi A. Annan (1997–2006) and Ban Ki-moon (2007–current) all directly addressed the importance of human security (Annan, 1999; Ban, 2011; Boutros-Ghali, 1992). Kofi Annan argued that human security in a modern world required the right of humanitarian intervention in times when this security was seriously compromised. A decade later, after years of de...