He noted that, in any case, “defeated fighters, such as those from Qalamoun, cannot spearhead new fights,” according to IS practices. “They are automatically moved to logistics and administrative positions.”
The Iraqi security forces’ push toward Qaim has come at the same time as US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and the Russian-backed Syrian regime and allied militias, most of which are funded by Iran, seem to be competing to gain territory across the border in IS-held areas of Syria’s easternmost, oil-rich Deir ez-Zor region.
Baghdad-based former air force pilot and strategy analyst Ahmed Sharifi told Al-Monitor that the fight to “restore the border” between Syria and Iraq was a major strategic aim of the fight to retake the cities in western Anbar province.
This is not only to ensure that supply lines from IS-held territory in Syria are severed, he stressed, but also because “IS followed a strategy of breaking the borders of nation states and establishing its own wilayat."
Restoring this key border, after it effectively had not existed for the past three years, is a way to achieve both symbolic and practical objectives, he said.
The ignoring of the same border by Iran-backed Iraqi paramilitary groups operating on both sides of it may, however, nullify at least some of these hard-won objectives.
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