The New Yorker

Are We Nearing the End with ISIS?
By Robin Wright

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.

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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/are-we-nearing-the-endgame-with-isis

The New Yorker

Is the Iran Deal Slipping Away?
By Robin Wright 

On July 17, the White House hastily organized a press teleconference on the Iranian nuclear deal. The accord—brokered by the world’s six major powers two years ago—is to President Trump’s foreign policy what Obamacare is to his domestic policy: he is determined to destroy it, without a coherent or viable strategy, so far, to replace it. It’s also not clear that Trump fully understands its details, complex diplomatic process, or long-term stakes any more than he does health care.

During the White House briefing, I asked the three senior Administration officials whether, after months of inflammatory declarations about the “bad deal” and the “bad” government in Tehran, the Trump Administration is moving toward a policy of regime change. It often sounds like it. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Congress in June that U.S. policy includes “support of those elements inside Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government.”

For two years, I covered the tortured diplomacy from both Washington and Tehran. I now feel the deal slipping away. The most important non-proliferation agreement in a quarter century, it was a diplomatic breakthrough because no one liked it and every party had to compromise. It succeeded in ending thirty-six years of tension in a way that—even Iran concedes—could have facilitated diplomacy on other flash points, notably Syria’s grisly war. It extended the potential “breakout” to produce a weapon to a year or more. It stipulated in three different ways that Iran will never be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb, and forged an international agreement on automatic “snap back” sanctions if it should try. It allowed Tehran to get some closely monitored capabilities back over time, yet it allowed the United States to maintain sanctions—and leverage—on Iran for other issues.

On July 18, I sat down in New York with Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, first one on one, and then with a small group of American journalists, to discuss the precarious state of play. 

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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-the-nuclear-deal-with-iran-slipping-away

The New Yorker

Can Mosul Be Put Back Together?
By Robin Wright 

For three years, Lena Kandes and her family lived under isis rule in Mosul. Sequestered in her home after being forced to abandon her university studies, she created an online alias—which she asked me to use—so she could connect with the outside world but not be traceable by the Islamic State’s goons. “We were prisoners there,” she told me earlier this year in Kurdistan, where her family had fled. “We got close to losing our minds.” Through a window, she watched a crowd stone to death a woman suspected of adultery. Kandes felt especially vulnerable because her father had been a contractor for the U.S. military. They had hosted U.S. Army officers at their home.

“My father hid the whole time isis was in Mosul,” she said. “We changed his look and burned papers, in the garden, showing that he had worked with the U.S. Army.” isis tried to recruit her sixteen-year-old brother, the youngest of her siblings, to be a “warrior of God” and a hero. “We knew from the things he said, the way he was acting,” she told me. “My mother told him that she’d raised him never to be like this.” The family bought video games from the underground, to divert his attention.

Last October, Iraq launched an offensive to liberate its second-largest city. “We were praying and waiting—and waiting,” Kandes said. As the battles raged, often block by block, her home lost power, then water. “We were so cold,” she said. “We were running out of strength.” In December, Kandes’s street became the front line between isis and Iraq’s élite counterterrorism force. “Our kitchen was full of bullets, the windows were all broken,” she told me. “Then isis came and said, ‘This is a war zone and we want to use your house.’ We were sure, ninety per cent, that we would die. So many died in our area.”

Kandes, along with her parents and four brothers, decided to try to escape—by foot.

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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/can-mosul-be-put-back-together-after-isis

The New Yorker

Mosul Falls: What's Next for ISIS?
By Robin Wright

     Exactly three years after it was declared, the Islamic State is now near defeat. The Iraqi Army has liberated Mosul, the largest city under isis control, while a Syrian militia has penetrated the Old City section of Raqqa, the capital of the pseudo-caliphate. But it is far too soon to celebrate. Since the rise of jihadi extremism four decades ago, its most enduring trait, through ever-evolving manifestations, is its ability to reinvent and revive movements that appeared beaten.

     Osama bin Laden slunk out of Afghanistan in disgrace, in 1989, after his miscalculations contributed to the deaths of thousands of Arab fighters. He was expelled from Sudan and lost his Saudi citizenship in the nineteen-nineties. He reëmerged to carry out the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but then was forced to flee Afghanistan. He abandoned his own fighters at Tora Bora, to go into hiding. A decade later, he was killed in a lightning raid by Navy seals. His body was dumped at sea.

     isis has followed a similar pattern. In its first iteration in Iraq, the group was “on the brink of collapse in 2007 and 2008—its senior leadership either dead, in hiding, or in prison,” Soufan notes. Tens of thousands of Iraqi tribesmen, backed by the United States, had turned on it. Its jihadi ranks were decimated to a few dozen men forced into the underground. Within seven years, however, its new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had reorganized and rebranded his group. By 2015, it had attracted more than thirty thousand fighters, from a hundred countries, to fight for the first modern caliphate. Despite an appalling death rate on the battlefield, of roughly ten thousand fighters a year, thousands more kept coming.

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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mosul-falls-what-is-next-for-isis

The New Yorker

America's Badass Immigrant Astronaut
By Robin Wright 
In the rarefied world of space travellers, NASA’s new astronaut class—seven men and five women, picked from a record-breaking eighteen thousand applicants—includes one, nicknamed “Jaws,” who played basketball at M.I.T., is a Marine Corps major, and was decorated for flying Cobra gunships on a hundred and fifty combat missions in Afghanistan. The astronaut candidate is also an immigrant—an Iranian-American, the only one with roots in the Middle East since the first class of astronauts was selected, in 1959. Most striking, Jaws is a woman. Her name is Jasmin Moghbeli, and she wears her black hair pulled back, accentuating the elegant Persian nose on her long, oval face. 
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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/jasmin-moghbeli-americas-badass-immigrant-astronaut