3121. Fighting Fire with Fire: The Growing Nexus between Atrocity Prevention and Counterterrorism and Its Implications for the Use of Force to Protect Civilians
- Author:
- Colin Thomas-Jensen
- Publication Date:
- 02-2018
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Abstract:
- By the fall of 2014, before the United States and its partners began the military campaign to erode the territory held by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, the international community understood the horrors endured by civilians living under IS control. While IS leadership plotted politically motivated attacks against its enemies in the region and in the West, reports trickling out from areas under the group’s merciless grip and IS’s own online propaganda clearly indicated a grave pattern of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including violence targeted at ethnic and religious minorities; women; the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community; and other vulnerable groups. As the United States considered its response to the rise of IS, the duality of the group’s threat—an external one to Americans and American interests and an internal one to civilians living in IS-held areas—animated two communities of US policy makers that had rarely interacted with one another: those focused on counterterrorism and atrocity prevention. The US-led military operation to prevent genocide by IS against the Yazidi community on Mount Sinjar, Iraq, that President Barack Obama announced on August 7, 2014, included the first volley of airstrikes in the more-than-three-year counterterrorism campaign to defeat IS in Iraq and Syria. Important for the atrocity-prevention community, the airstrikes and deployment of Special Operations Forces (alongside humanitarian experts) to help coordinate the evacuation of civilians demonstrated an openness on the part of senior US policy makers to use counterterrorism capabilities to prevent a mass atrocity. In hindsight, however, US-led lethal action against IS fighters who threatened thousands of Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar was more the outcome of a unique set of circumstances than a harbinger of a more collaborative relationship between the counterterrorism community and policy makers focused on preventing atrocities committed by state actors, such as the governments of Syria, South Sudan, and Myanmar, and nonstate actors, including militia groups with little to no connection with international terrorist networks. With terrorist groups such as IS, Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin, and al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa almost certain to continue atrocities against local populations in areas in which they operate, a fundamental question for policy makers arises. Did the extreme circumstances under which the United States and its partners decided to intervene on Mount Sinjar necessarily represent a threshold for action, or can a more normalized relationship between the atrocityprevention and counterterrorism communities be advanced—a relationship that would seek to leverage counterterrorism tools and resources to take decisive action to protect non-US citizens from atrocities while improving measures to avoid civilian casualties, including civilians killed during actions taken by US counterterrorism partners? Drawing from interviews with nearly 40 former and current US policy makers and outside experts1 , as well as a convening of 20 experts at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in June 2017, this paper explains the increasing relevance of the counterterrorism–atrocityprevention nexus and defines some of the significant challenges of closer collaboration between those communities, with a specific focus on preventing imminent atrocities. Defining when (including clearly articulated criteria for what constitutes “imminent” in this scenario), how, and under whose authority to use force to prevent atrocities against civilians is only one element of broadening a counterterrorism strategy that also includes diplomacy and countering violent extremism (CVE) efforts. 2 This paper is narrowly focused on the use of force and argues that in some circumstances, the atrocity-prevention agenda can be advanced by using counterterrorism tools—including lethal strikes—to prevent imminent atrocities against civilians in areas where terrorist groups operate.
- Topic:
- Counter-terrorism, Islamic State, Civilians, Atrocity Prevention, and Protection
- Political Geography:
- Iraq, Middle East, Global Focus, and United States of America