3 - How Germany and the UK Anticipated ISIS’s Rise to Power in Syria and Iraq

Summary

Introduction

ISIS’s rise to power in Syria and Iraq in 2013–14 was a slow-burning crisis whose effects turned out to have significant implications for European security. The situation escalated while European decision-makers were handling other foreign crises, notably in Ukraine. Many expert observers perceived the Iraqi army’s defeat at Mosul and the fall of the city to ISIS in June 2014 as a political-military shock. While this was a key turning point, as has been discussed in the US-centred strategic surprise literature, little attention has been paid to earlier experiences of surprise and to European contexts of estimative intelligence production.

This chapter explores how British and German intelligence communities and external experts anticipated ISIS’s expansion in Syria and Iraq and its reach into Europe during an early phase of the crisis (July 2013–June 2014). To answer this, we look at three interconnected sub-questions: what were knowledge producers surprised about as the crisis unfolded, how did they perform, and what were the underlying reasons for performance problems? Both sections of this chapter, on Germany by Eva Michaels and on the UK by Aviva Guttmann, are structured the same way along these questions. The identical structure allows for a cross-actor comparison at the end of this chapter. Throughout, we pay special attention to the conditions under which knowledge producers in both countries operated, by considering factors that hindered or enabled their ability to forecast risk-related developments.

For both countries, we systematically reviewed open-source knowledge claims by selected non-governmental experts about ISIS’s activities and structural vulnerabilities that were published between 1 July 2013 and 9 June 2014. Choosing this period allowed for a reconstruction of expert knowledge once ISIS had started activities in Syria and Iraq that were of strategic consequence (for example tightening its grip on Raqqa, expanding its footprint in northern Syria, escalating violent attacks against predominantly Shia targets across Iraq) and before a prominent event (fall of Mosul) occurred. Towards the end of this period, Europe also experienced its first ISIS-inspired terrorist attack by a radicalised returning foreign fighter which highlighted the potential for ISIS to cause serious harm in Europe.