As the number of Britons confirmed dead in the Sousse massacre continues to climb, Prime Minister David Cameron has again  out putting British troops on the ground in Iraq and Syria, but he has conceded that the Islamic State (IS) is plotting “terrible attacks” on Western soil.

This is a sign that the attack in Tunisia has made the magnitude of the war against IS clearer than ever. Until now, the British government has been able to downplay it—an official strategy reminiscent of the aftermath of July 7, 2005.

In the days after 52 people were killed in the 7/7 attacks in London, the Blair government was insistent that the Iraq War had nothing whatsoever to do with the appalling massacre. That argument had to be  back eight weeks later when Al Jazeera screened a “martyr video” recorded by one of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, which drew an explicit link between the attack and British foreign policy.

Khan said: “We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.” He went on: “Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people and your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters.”

In retrospect, the government’s insistence that these were simply evil men undertaking terrible actions that were utterly unconnected with the war is understandable, given that the Iraq War went on to permanently contaminate former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s legacy.

Now, here we are again ten years later. This time, the connection is more complex, but the link with Britain is clear enough. Yet the extraordinary element is that the great majority of people in the United Kingdom are hardly aware that this is a major war—and that Britain is at the center of it.

It was clear some days before the  in Tunisia and Kuwait that Islamic State leaders wanted to take the war to their external enemies, whether Shiite communities in the Middle East or elements of the more distant “far enemy” such as the UK. As The New York Times  it: “While officials in the three countries investigated the attacks, many noted that the leaders of IS have repeatedly called for sympathizers to kill and sow mayhem at home.”

The same week, the spokesman for IS, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, the group’s followers for Ramadan, telling them that acts during the Muslim holy month earned greater rewards in heaven. “Muslims, embark and hasten toward jihad,” Adnani  in an audio message. “Oh mujahedeen everywhere, rush and go to make Ramadan a month of disasters for the infidels.”

It is now almost certain that the Sousse attack by a young engineering student, Seifeddiene Rezgui, was not a “lone wolf” operation but supported by a larger group and aimed specifically at a hotel in which most of those killed would be British. It may even have been directed from the Islamic State. The British government has committed a huge force of 600 police to the investigation.

While one intention was seriously to wreck the Tunisian tourist industry, leading to higher unemployment and more anger and resentment, providing a better environment for recruiting young people to the IS cause, it was probably part of a much wider intention to bring the conflict home to the coalition of countries now engaged in the air war.

This makes for uncomfortable connections, especially as most people in Britain simply do not recognize that the country is part of a large coalition that has been waging a major air offensive on IS forces in Iraq and Syria for almost a year.

True scale

The Pentagon surprised the US public recently by reporting that there had been around 15,600 air sorties since the campaign started in August 2014, and that air and drone strikes are killing IS supporters at the rate of 1,000 a . The US is the main actor, but the UK is second in terms of the number of air and armed drone strikes.

Britain’s principal contributions are Tornado ground-attack aircraft and Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles. The Ministry of Defence is singularly cautious about releasing details of British involvement, especially of the two squadrons of Reaper drones, but it is  that more attacks have been carried out in recent months by the armed drones, which are “flown” from RAF Waddington, south of Lincoln, than by the Tornadoes.

The ministry gives even vaguer details of casualties; on those few occasions when information about attacks is released, almost nothing is said about those killed and injured. This persistent obfuscation means there has been surprisingly little debate about the true scale of the war and Britain’s part in it.

One of the grim ironies of the Sousse attack is that the appalling loss of life might alert more people in the UK to the true extent of the war. Equally, IS will no doubt encourage further attacks on the countries at war with it; counterterrorism forces in countries as far afield as the United States, Australia, Canada, France and Britain will accordingly be intensifying their work.

It is possible that the Sousse massacre will turn out to be an isolated attack on British nationals, but it is very unlikely. The reality is that the war with IS in Iraq and Syria is beginning to extend beyond those countries and the Middle East—even beyond the established battlegrounds of  and . What happened to the holidaymakers in Sousse may only be the beginning of a new phase.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In the space of two days, developments in the war against the (IS) apparently saw both a devastating loss and a major success. The fall of , the capital of Anbar Province in , to IS paramilitaries after weeks of fighting in spite of air power support is very bad news for the coalition.

But the US was at least able to celebrate the successful of Abu Sayyaf in a special forces night raid on the town of Deir al-Zour. The Pentagon has presented the operation as a success, coming at a time when the war against the Islamic State is not being won.

However, a closer look at what happened suggests this is not good news at all.

The fall of Ramadi is certainly significant, not least because the centerpiece of the Iraqi government’s operation to defeat the Islamic State had been wresting back control of the whole of Anbar Province. Instead, the city’s defenses collapsed in the face of an IS onslaught, with more than 500 Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed only a day after the government had rushed in reinforcements. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has responded to the loss by  on Shiite militias from Baghdad to join the fight — a risky decision, given that Ramadi’s Sunni population is deeply suspicious of Abadi’s Shiite-dominated government.

To make matters worse, the Iraqi army fled the city leaving behind at least 60 US-supplied military vehicles, and the units based at the Anbar Operations Command left behind a huge cache of weapons. According to , these included “rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns” and “had been supplied by both the US and Russia.”

Despite this stunning reversal, gains were supposedly being made elsewhere. Only 24 hours earlier, the Pentagon had announced the killing of a key Islamic State leader, Abu Sayyaf, by a substantial Delta Force unit at Deir al-Zour, a small but strategically situated Syrian city about 80 miles from the Iraqi border.

A US official Sayyaf as the Islamic State’s “emir of oil and gas,” playing a key role in raising revenues from fuel production at scores of small wells across northeastern Syria — much of the money being gained by taxing products  across the border into Turkey.

During the raid at least a dozen IS fighters were killed along with Sayyaf, whose wife was captured and brought back to Iraq.

This was initially counted as a success for the US, but as more details emerged, it was clear that Sayyaf was important because of his knowledge rather than his power. Tunisian by birth, he had first traveled to Iraq in 2003 at the time of the US occupation and had been involved in the resistance for most of a decade, most recently in Syria. He was a mid-level member of the IS organization, not a senior leader, and he was described by one US analyst as the of Al Capone’s accountant.

Such a person would have a broad knowledge of the Islamic State’s entire system of management and control, exactly what has made the movement so spectacularly .

This is not the kind of target against whom you launch a powerful and lethal US special forces unit into the heart of Syria, moving in a unit of V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor troop carriers supported by Black Hawk helicopters, if you merely want to eliminate him. If killing him had been the actual aim, drones or strike aircraft would have been used, as they have on many other against the IS leadership. The US aim was clearly to capture Sayyaf and bring him back for what is politely termed “robust interrogation.”

Put bluntly, for all the Pentagon’s post-attack hype, this was a raid that failed. Sayyaf’s death robs the US forces of a chance to better understand the inner organization of IS, a valuable prize with the war hardly going the West’s way.

Fly by Night

This kind of night raid was typical of operations undertaken repeatedly in Iraq back in 2004-07, when American and British special forces were fighting to control the Iraq insurgency. In those operations, Operation Arcadia in 2006, thousands of insurgents were killed or captured, with many of the latter subject to interrogation leading to further raids. At its peak, the operation by Task Force 145 involved up to 300 night raids a .

At the time, this was credited with giving the US the advantage in the war, but it is now clear that many of the Islamic State’s core leaders have survived that singularly violent period, thanks no doubt to their extensive combat experience against the best-trained and most heavily armed forces the Americans and British operated in Iraq.

These two events augur ill for the trajectory of the war. The Deir al-Zour raid is the first publicly acknowledged offensive special forces raid into Syria, but there may well have been others, and it is highly unlikely to be the last. The fall of Ramadi, meanwhile, shows that  than 6,000 airstrikes since the summer of 2014 have failed to force IS into retreat.

That inescapable fact means the war will, in all probability, escalate to direct ground combat involving special forces, however, much of the Obama administration has been reluctant to sanction it. In that context, the failure to take Sayyaf alive will be of much greater concern to the Pentagon than it is prepared to admit.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The pre-publication hype surrounding the new report on Iran's nuclear ambitions from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) indicated that the conclusions would be definitive. In light of these expectations, the document—released on 9 November 2011—is rather tame. It claims that Iran has made sustained efforts to develop nuclear-warhead technology, though many of the efforts cited occurred in the early 2000s, and there is little direct evidence of what is happening now. It is the link between the weapons research and two other factors that makes the case for revisiting Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The first is the Iranian programme of uranium enrichment that has been steadily accumulating stocks of lower-level reactor-grade uranium (about 4% enrichment) and a much smaller amount of research-reactor fuel (rated at 20%). Weapons-grade fissile material requires an enrichment grade well over 80%, which could be within grasp of the Iranians. Alongside the warhead work, this suggests Iran has made real progress towards a virtual bomb, even if it is still some way from becoming a nuclear power or even making the final decision to become one.

The second factor is the Iranian construction programme, which includes several major underground facilities. These were created in expectation of an attack, either from Israel or the United States, and from determination to ensure the nuclear project's survival. Moreover, Iran has already experienced a cyber-attack (in the form of the Stuxnet worm) and the assassination of several nuclear scientists – so it is already on something close to a war footing.

The comments of US defence secretary Leon Panetta on 10 November that any military action would have "unintended consequences" and should in any case be a "last resort" indicate that, in the context of the wider current political environment, Washington will not become directly involved in a war with Iran at an early stage. But an Israeli attack would create a risk that could embroil Barack Obama's administration in the attack’s aftermath: an initial assault will be only the beginning of a war which will bring major change to the region and possibly beyond.

The Operation

The nature of an attack shapes what is likely to follow. Most observers envisage a series of air and missile strikes against the material centres of Iran's nuclear programme. Such strikes would happen, but Israel’s attack could be more extensive than some observers predict since Israel seeks to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions for several years at least. This means a systematic effort to demolish the programme's intellectual infrastructure: the scientists and engineers directly involved (who themselves will be crucial targets), research centres, factory drawing offices, university departments and even elements of the leadership.

However, Israel cannot guarantee effective results by operating from its own territory alone; it needs local allies. Here, Kurdish Iraq (its north-eastern region) and Azerbaijan are important. Israel has assiduously developed close relations with both. In the latter case, this has meant taking sides with a Muslim country locked in a frozen conflict with the (Christian) Armenians–who are supported by Tehran—over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Kurdish Iraq and Azerbaijan would not necessarily offer Israel forward operating bases for strike aircraft. They could, however, include numerous support functions such as the incursion of Special Forces into Iran, search and rescue, overflying by tanker aircraft, and launch sites for some of Israel's many and potent armed drones.

In short, an Israeli operation against Iran will be comprehensive and will use regional facilities to inflict maximum damage on Iran's nuclear programme and its supporting infrastructure. But the moment it starts, the political dynamics will change.

The Response

Iran will at the outset present itself as the victim of an attack by a state that already has a powerful nuclear arsenal and is regarded across the region as a belligerent pariah. Some regional elites—such as the House of Saud in Riyadh—may privately welcome the Israeli action, but the popular response across the region would be very different and create huge problems for governments.

Iran will have taken these outcomes into consideration, and as a result might limit its reaction to an immediate withdrawal from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. It may even restrain its Hizbollah ally in Lebanon, in combination with the incremental application of a range of asymmetric measures on its spheres of influence in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. These would, respectively, seek to exacerbate tensions between Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Malaki and the Kurds; complicate and disrupt the American war effort; and increase oil and gas prices. Iran might also act against Azerbaijan if its provision of facilities to Israel was proved—which, given the size of Azerbaijan's energy exports, could affect world markets.

Iran is also certain to seize the moment to develop nuclear weapons. This may be sooner than many expect, because Iranian planners will have inevitably already thought through the nature of an Israeli strike and have sought means of protecting their physical infrastructure (by hardening facilities) and their intellectual infrastructure (by dispersal).

The Chance

The near-unavoidable reality is that out of confrontation Iran will soon acquire a limited nuclear arsenal. This is because even a limited bombing of Iran will create a new dynamic in which Iran is at the centre of the post-attack region, has several new options to impose costs on its opponents, goes full-tilt for its own deterrent measures.

Still, there remains some scope within the region to avert a crisis. That would require a move to address sources of disabling tension (such as the Israel-Palestine and Iran-Saudi Arabia disputes) amid wide endorsement from the international community of the need to create a stable nuclear-free zone. Any such process would be tortuous and protracted, but the belief that there is a military solution to the Iran dilemma is so dangerous that this alternative approach simply must be considered.

The perilous situation over Iran reflects world leaders' long-term and heedless pursuit of nuclear weapons, and their failure to make serious attempts at wholesale denuclearisation. The lack of political wisdom, after almost seventy years of the nuclear age, is striking. The need for it is more acute than ever.

*[This article was originally published in the independent online magazine on November 11, 2011]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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