The biggest question facing the Arab world in 2015 concerns the future of Daesh militants, and whether the military campaign mounted by coalition forces will succeed in defeating their attempts to establish a self-styled caliphate, a Muslim state based on the strict interpretation of Islamic law, Con Coughlin said on a commentary on Saturday.
At the start of 2014, few people had heard of Daesh, but by the end of the year the group had become one of the most feared terrorist organisations of modern times, spreading terror through large swathes of Northern Iraq and Syria, he said on the Telegraph.
In 2015, question marks will remain about the effectiveness of the coalition’s military campaign so long as politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are reluctant to commit combat troops to deal with the threat.
The unpopularity of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan has led politicians to hope Daesh can be dealt with by air power and locally trained forces that support Western objectives. And while it is true that the intensity of coalition air strikes has disrupted Daesh’s operations, the group shows no sign of giving up on its relentless advance through predominantly Sunni Muslim areas of the Arab world.
Moreover, Daesh’s fate will have a knock-on effect on the rest of the region in 2015, particularly in North Africa, where groups of Islamist fanatics in countries like Libya and Algeria are likely to continue their attempts to replicate Daesh’s successes in Syria and Iraq.
In Egypt, the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood has brought a certain degree of stability to North Africa’s most dominant power, and helped to bring greater security to Egypt and the wider region, including the all-important Sinai peninsula, which is vital to reviving Egypt’s flagging tourism industry.
The other important factor for maintaining peace in the eastern Mediterranean is whether there is likely to be progress in the stalled negotiations between Israel and the Arabs over the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, territory that has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 War. Here the omens do not bode well.
The failure of talks earlier in 2014 led to increased acts of violence, including the murder of four worshippers at a Jerusalem synagogue and the likelihood in 2015 is that, so long as negotiations remain stalled, more random acts of violence can be expected.