A Plan for Defeating ISIS

For years, the Obama administration struggled to fight ISIS and their increasing power in the Middle East. Even though Obama permitted drone strikes in the Middle East, the Trump administration must increase their force against the terrorist group to defeat them for once and for all. In order to do this, I have a few ideas on how the United States should proceed or continue to proceed. However, it is important to recognize that no plan will leave the United States with a perfect ending, and the United States needs to take risks to save itself from more terrorist attacks.

First, the United States must continue its use of drone strikes. While it is true that drone strikes have the ability to accidentally kill innocent civilians, it helps defeat ISIS in the long run and prevent more terrorist attacks. Having some civilians die is better than ISIS’s top leaders continuing to run the militant group and recruit more civilians which will ultimately become fighters for the Islamic State. That would result in even more civilian deaths than the civilians killed in drone strikes.

The United States needs to work in conjunction with other nations and put more troops on the ground in Syria and parts of Iraq near the Syrian border. The US should create a coalition of countries, France, UK, and the US in the front, to fight the Islamic State on the ground. A multilateral approach will benefit all countries, near and far, from terrorist attacks and from hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees trying to enter countries. The Islamic State wants territory. In order for a caliphate to be established, the caliph must rule territory and have land; that is why ISIS is continuously fighting for more land. Drone strikes will not prevent ISIS from taking over more land and recruiting civilians; it will only take some leaders out of power. ISIS’s landholdings have decreased, which is great, but we must continue our efforts to ensure that no civilian is living under the Islamic State.

You might be wondering how the US can incentivize more countries to put their troops on the ground. There are some key countries that the US needs, including Turkey, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. The United States should issue separate ultimatums to Turkey and Russia. Seeing that the Kurdish forces are a threat to Turkey, the US should threaten to continue to fund or increase funding to the Kurdish forces, which they are doing right now, unless Turkey joins in on the fight against ISIL. The US should impose harsher sanctions on Russia’s energy sector for interfering with the 2016 election, seeing that the sanctions are damaging their economy in which more than fifty percent relies on the energy sector, unless Russia agrees to put troops on the ground. Lastly, the US and Saudi Arabia made an arms deal worth nearly 110 billion dollars. Seeing that Saudi Arabia is near the chaos that lies in Syria, it would be to their benefit if they put in troops to fight ISIS, especially if the US urged them.

No, this plan is not perfect. However, conducting drone strikes, like what the Obama administration, is not what is going to defeat ISIS; it will help, but it will not destroy the terrorist group. History proves that multilateral approaches, such as the Persian Gulf War, have been successful in defeating oppressive groups and regimes. Not later, not in a few years, but now ISIS must be defeated. Too many civilians in Syria are being recruited or tortured because they have no other way to live, and too many people all around the world have been killed by these terrorist attacks. ISIS must be stopped, and that is not going to happen without a strong military presence in the region.