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CNAS.org: Gray Zones in the Middle East

Posted by: Berhane Habtemariam

Date: Tuesday, 19 September 2017

Gray Zones in the Middle East

                                   By Nicholas Heras

September 19, 2017

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The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and trans-Sahara regions are undergoing a period of instability and state collapse, with active civil wars raging in four of the most important countries in the region: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. As witnessed during the Arab uprisings of 2010–2011, the MENA region has begun to grapple with the once and future challenges of instability as the regional population grows and skews younger, economies stagnate and start to collapse, and resources become scarcer. U.S. national security policy toward the MENA and trans-Sahara regions is at a point of high uncertainty, with a new administration developing strategies to address the security threats to the United States and its partner nations being caused by the region’s civil wars.

Ongoing instability in the region from these civil wars, combined with the underlying social, economic, and political challenges, is providing opportunities for state and non-state actors alike to seek advantages in “gray zone” conflicts. The term “gray zone” is a new way to describe a condition of human conflict that goes back to antiquity: the state between war and peace, where actors (state and non-state) seek to defeat their opponents without extensive or sustained military activity.1 These actors are increasingly turning to gray zone strategies to avoid direct, expensive, and unsustainable military confrontations, with either state or non-state competitors. Gray zone activities include information operations, psychological operations, political destabilization operations, unconventional warfare such as supporting a partner state’s military capabilities through foreign internal defense and counterterrorism support, and mobilizing proxy forces.2

In the MENA and trans-Sahara regions, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its expeditionary Quds Force (IRGC-QF) and the transnational network of Shia militias that is mobilizing – including Salafi-Jihadi and Sunni extremist organizations (Eos) such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as well as Lebanese Hezbollah – are the U.S. opponents that actively and consistently employ gray zone strategies. These actors are seeking to use this period of intense transition in the MENA and trans-Sahara regions, which has led to governance vacuums, to seek to create new social, political, and security realities that will benefit them at the expense of the United States and its partners. ISIS and al Qaeda, generally viewed as non-state actors, are now building sociopolitical power in areas where governance vacuums exist so as to enable themselves to regenerate when attacked and to operate at the seams of U.S. combatant commands; these Eos can thereby target and strike at the United States and its partners in Europe and in these regions.3

This study analyzes the gray zone activities of Iran’s IRGC-QF and its proxy network, including the IRGC-QF’s partner force Lebanese Hezbollah, in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and the increasingly effective gray zone strategies of ISIS and al Qaeda. In the analysis of Iran, this study will examine the way that the country, working closely with Russia and the Assad regime, utilizes classic gray zone strategies such as unconventional warfare and information operations to advance Iranian national security goals in Syria. The analysis of Eos describes ways both ISIS and al Qaeda are similarly seeking to utilize gray zone activities in the governance vacuums in the greater MENA region to develop indefinite, state-like authority among local populations.....................

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Berhane


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