Islamic State Leads Mideast Into Warlord Era as Nations Dissolve
By Glen Carey Oct 2, 2014 4:37 PM ET
The Middle East may be sliding toward a warlord era, with nation-states increasingly struggling to control all their territory and millions living under the rule of emergent local chiefs and movements.
Armed irregular forces hold effective power over growing areas of Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya where central government authority barely reaches. Motivated by religious ideology or regional separatism, they have grabbed oil facilities and weapons, imposed taxes or changed school curriculums, and fought each other as well as national armies.
“It is almost like the whole regional order that was built in the 20th century is collapsing,” Nadim Shehadi, associate fellow at the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House in London, said in an interview. “Non-state actors are filling the vacuum.”
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The breakdown, in a region that holds more than half the world’s oil, has allowed extremist groups to thrive and drawn in external powers bent on stopping them. Underlying many of the conflicts is the inability of governments to provide security and basic services. In turn, economic failure will be even harder to remedy without functioning administrations.
It’s not clear whether interventions such as the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria can put the pieces back together, said James Coyle, director of global education at Chapman University in California. Military operations will only achieve short-term gains, unless governments are “given legitimacy by the people through the provision of security and basic social services,” he said by e-mail.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-02/islamic-state-leads-mideast-into-warlord-era-as-nations-dissolve.html
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