Disarmament and International Security Council Disec

DISARMAMENT AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL [DISEC]

INTERNATIONAL MILLITARY INTERVENTION IN COMBATTING ISIS FORCES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND ITS REPERCUSSIONS

LETTER FROM THE EXECUTIVE BOARD

Dear delegates,

A zealous and a hearty welcome
to The Disarmament and International Security Council, the first committee at General Assembly of the United Nations. This committee will emulate a meeting of the States to discuss the international military interventions with the intention of combating ISIS. You will give your best efforts to ensure everlasting peace, which the diplomats of the early 21st Century failed and ensure that world never sees a militant group as such.
It’s expected that delegates take this MUN both as a way of learning about international agendas, treaties, pacts, agreements, allies, news and other information, along with acquiring confidence in expression of views and opinions and of having best of their times in this three day event. To notify, don’t feel introverted to contact me for ‘any’ queries, as small as it may it be.
Working on this MUN has indeed been a very humbling experience for me with regards to the issues selected and as a chair; I would expect passionate debating from the delegates and also coming up with mitigation measures reviewed from a different perspective: a perspective of a young mind. In an attempt to facilitate your research, we have prepared a comprehensive background guide to provide insight into the committee and the agenda in a lucid manner. You are expected to have a clear understanding of the Rules of Procedure and all the issues pertaining to the agenda of the committee. Sharpen your knowledge on all the relevant issues and explore your country’s history and policies thoroughly. Wishing you all the best in your preparation for DPSGMUN. I look forward to seeing you all this December.
I hope this MUN and DISEC turns out to be a constructive step towards the conditioning of the delegates.

Sincerely,
Hrithik Modi

[CHAIR]

Dear Delegates,

It is an honor to be serving as the Executive Board of the Disarmament and International Security Council at DPSGMUN, 2015. Please consider that the following guide, as the name suggests, is merely to provide you with the basic idea of the agenda and the scenario of the crISIS. Your real potential in proving yourself to be an amazing MUNner lies in the depth of research beyond this guide. I hope to see an intense debating session along with strong and factually correct information. I hope to see collective participation from all of you in all of the sessions and if any help regarding the agenda or rules of procedure are required, the Organizing Committee as well as the Executive board members would be much obliged to answer your queries.

This being said, I hope that the three days of the conference which await us may be intellectually as well as educationally stimulating for all of us.

Happy researching!

Apratim Bannerjee

[Vice-chair]

INTRODUCTION

Disarmament and International Security

United Nations General Assembly – 1 (UNGA-1)

The First Committee deals with disarmament, global challenges and threats to peace that affect the international community and seeks out solutions to the challenges in the international security regime.

All 195 full member and full observer-status States are allowed to attend and participate. DISEC came into being with the creation of the UN, so first met shortly after the first UNGAsession, in January 1946 – with representatives of just 51 nations. The first ever resolution, adopted by The First Committee on the 24th January was to form a commission on the issues raised by atomic energy. DISEC possess a crucial mandate: to consider disarmament and international security issues across the world, in order to ensure peace and the progress of disarmament. DISEC attempts to form agreements between states on both these issues, in order to form consensus to confront those issues on their mandate. It considers all disarmament and international security matters within the scope of theCharteror relating to the powers and functions of any other organ of the United Nations; the general principles of cooperation in the maintenance of international peace and security, as well as principles governing disarmament and the regulation of armaments; promotion of cooperative arrangements and measures aimed at strengthening stability through lower levels of armaments.

The Committee works in close cooperation with theUnited Nations Disarmament Commissionand the Geneva-basedConference on Disarmament. It is the only Main Committee of the General Assembly entitled to verbatim records coverage.

The First Committee sessions are structured into three distinctive stages:

General debate
Thematic discussions
Action on drafts

THE MIDDLE EASTERN CONFLICT The end of Nations and the Start of a New Dark Age

Iraq has disintegrated. Little is exchanged between its three great communities – Shia, Sunni and Kurd – except gunfire. The outside world hopes that a more inclusive government will change this but it is probably too late.

The main victor in the new war in Iraq is the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) which wants to annihilate Shia, rather than negotiate with them. Iraq is facing a civil war that could be as bloody as anything that we have seen in Syria and could go on for years.

The Iraqi government had an army with 350,000 soldiers on which $41.6bn (£25bn) had been spent in the three years from 2011, but this force melted away without significant resistance.

The flights were led by commanding officers, some of whom rampantly defected their national allegiances as they abandoned their men. Given that ISIS may have had as few as 1,300 fighters in its assault on Mosul this was one of the great military debacles in history.

Within two weeks, those parts of northern and western Iraq outside Kurdish control were in the hands of ISIS. By the end of the month the group had announced a caliphate straddling the Iraq-Syria border.

The political geography of Iraq was changing before its people's eyes and there were material signs of this everywhere:to hire a truck to come the 200 miles from the Kurdish capital Erbil to Baghdad now cost $10,000 for a single journey, compared to $500 a month earlier. Particularly, Sunni districts such as al-Adhamiyah on the east bank of the Tigris River, young men rightly believed that if they passed through a checkpoint they were likely to be arrested or worse. There were ominous signs that Iraqis feared a future filled with violence as weapons and ammunition soared in price. The cost of a bullet for an AK47 assault rifle quickly tripled to 3,000 Iraqi dinars. Suddenly, almost everybody had guns, including even Baghdad's paunchy, white-shirted traffic police who began carrying sub-machine guns.

Soon dead bodies were being dumped at night. They were stripped of their ID cards but were assumed to be Sunni victims of the militia death squads.The renewed sectarian violence was very visible. There was an appalling video of Iraqi military cadets being machine-gunned near Tikrit by a line of ISIS gunmen as they stood in front of a shallow open grave. Human rights organisations using satellite pictures said they estimated the number of dead to be 170 though it might have been many more.

The fall of Mosul and the ISIS-led Sunni revolt marks the end of a distinct period in Iraqi history that began with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the US and British invasion of March 2003. There was an attempt by the Iraqi opposition to the old regime and their foreign allies to create a new Iraq in which the three communities shared power in Baghdad. The experiment failed disastrously and it seems it will be impossible to resurrect it because the battle lines between Kurd, Sunni and Shia are now too stark and embittered. One of the most important resurgences is that of the Al-Qa'ida-type movements that today rule a vast area in north and west Iraq and eastern and northern Syria. In fact, it is since Osama bin Laden's death (May 2, 2011) that al-Qa'ida affiliates or clones have had their greatest successes, including the capture of Raqqa in the eastern part of Syria, the only provincial capital in that country to fall to the rebels, in March 2013. In January 2014, ISIS took over Fallujah just 40 miles west of Baghdad, a city famously besieged and stormed by US marines 10 years earlier. Within a few months they had also captured Mosul and Tikrit.

The triumph of ISIS in Iraq in 2013-14 came as a particular surprise because the western media had largely stopped reporting the country. This lack of coverage had been convenient for the US and other Western governments because it enabled them to play down the extent to which "the war on terror" had failed so catastrophically in the years since 9/11.

This failure is masked by deceptions and self-deceptions on the part of governments. An intelligence officer from a Middle East country neighbouring Syria told me that ISIS members "say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments."

A striking development in the Islamic world in recent decades is the way in which Wahhabism is taking over mainstream Sunni Islam. In one country after another Saudi Arabia is putting up the money for the training of preachers and the building of mosques. A result of this is the spread of sectarian strife between Sunni and Shia. The latter find themselves targeted with unprecedented viciousness from Tunisia to Indonesia.

ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ AND LEVANT [ISIS]-

ISIS is aWahhabi/Salafi jihadistextremistmilitant group and self-proclaimedIslamic stateandcaliphate, which is led by and mainly composed ofSunniArabs fromIraqand Syria.As of March 2015, it has control over territory occupied by ten million peoplein Iraq and Syria, and has nominal control over small areas ofLibya,Nigeria andAfghanistan.The group also operates or has affiliates in other parts of the world, includingNorth AfricaandSouth Asia.

ISIS took most of the world by surprise when it swept into the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014, the group and its forebears had been proclaiming their goals for a decade.ISIS is mysterious in part because it is so many things at once. It combines Islamic piety and reverence for the prophet and his companions with the most modern social-media platforms and encryption schemes; its videos blend the raw pornographic violence of a snuff film with the pious chanting of religious warriors; the group has the discipline of a prison gang (many of its recruits were indeed drawn from U.S.-organized prisons in Iraq), but also the tactical subtlety and capacity for deception of the most skilled members of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services, who were also pulled into the ISIS net. It appears less brittle than al-Qaeda because its members care less about religious doctrine and organizational hierarchy, i.e. - ISIS is solid at the core but loose at the edges

The story of ISIS teaches the same basic lesson that emerged from America’s other failures in the Middle East over the last decade: Attempts by the United States or Islamist rebels to topple authoritarian regimes—in Iraq, Libya, and now Syria—create power vacuums. This empty political space will be filled by extremists unless the United States and its allies build strong local forces that can suppress terrorist groups and warlords both. When the U.S. creates such local forces, it must be persistent. If it withdraws from these efforts, as America did in Iraq in 2011, it invites mayhem. Halfway American intervention has produced nothing but trouble. Rebels have gotten enough support to continue fighting, but not enough to win.

Bottom line is, ISIS can be combated and overthrown only by revolutionary changes in the geo-socio-political scenario of the Middle East and combined efforts of transnational military forces.

COUNTRIES INVOLVED IN THE MIDDLE EASTERN CRISIS

US-led coalition

Started on 15 June 2014, when President Obama ordered US forces to be dispatched to the region, in response to offensives in Iraq conducted by theIslamic State of Iraq and the Levant(ISIL). American troops went, at the invitation of theIraqi Government, to assessIraqi forcesand the threat posed by ISIL.U.S. Secretary of StateJohn Kerryon 5 September invited Ministers of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark for a separate meetingin which he pressed them to support the fight against ISIL militarily and financially.Those nine countries agreed to do so by supporting anti-ISIL forces in Iraq and Syria with supplies and air support,

Russia-led coalition

End of September 2015,Russia,Iraq,IranandSyriahave agreed to fight ISIL togetherand have set up a 'joint information center' inBaghdadto coordinate their anti-ISIL operations

Bahrain:The oil-wealthy Gulf nation east of Saudi Arabia was part of the first handful of nations that participated in airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria.Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed al Khalifa,speaking on CNN in September, called ISIS a "deviated cult" that must be fought. On Sunday, Bahrain announced it was sending aircraft to Jordan to participate in anti-ISIS efforts.Bahrain has had close relations with the United States for years, and the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet is in based in Bahrain.

Belgium:The country has conducted airstrikes against ISIS targets, according to U.S. Central Command. In January, Belgian authoritiesbroke up a plot by ISIS veteransto launch a terror attack in the country.

Canada:Its warplanes have flown 310 sorties against ISIS targets as of February 11, theCanadian armed forces reported.Canadian aircraft have also flown dozens of aerial refueling and reconnaissance missions in support of the anti-ISIS fight, and its cargo aircraft have been used to deliver military aid from Albania and the Czech Republic,the Canadian military said. The military has also sent a small detachment to help advise the Iraqi government and donated $5 million in humanitarian aid.

Denmark:It has conducted airstrikes against ISIS targets, according to U.S. Central Command.

Egypt:The country struck ISIS targets in Libya on Monday after the group reportedly executed 21 Egyptian Christians, and called on anti-ISIS coalition partners to do the same, saying the group poses a threat to international safety and security.Egypthad previously agreed to join the anti-ISIS coalition, but details about its role, if any, have been scarce. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said Egypt has a critical role to play in countering ISIS ideology, and Egypt's grand mufti condemned the terror group, saying that its actions are not in line with Islam,Al-Arabiya reported.

France:French planes have taken part in airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, and the nation has flownreconnaissance flights over Iraq, contributed ammunition and madehumanitarian drops over the nation.France's air force was also part of anoperation in the Iraqi town of Amerli, along with Australia and Great Britain, that pushed back ISIS fighters. ISIS has called for attacks against Western citizens, singling out "the spiteful and filthy French" for punishment. A video emerged of militants who have pledged allegiance to ISISbeheading Herve Gourdel, a French citizen who was kidnapped in Algeria.

Germany:Although it has declined to participate in airstrikes, Germany has provided Kurdish forces in Iraq with$87 million worth of weapons and other military equipment, along with a handful of troops to help with training, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported. Germany has also banned activities supporting ISIS, including making it illegal to fly the trademark black flag of theIslamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Italy:It has sent weapons and ammunition valued at $2.5 million to Kurdish fighters in Iraq, along with 280 troops to help train them, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

Iraq:The Kurdish fighting force, the Peshmerga, is battling ISIS on the ground.

Kurdish fighters helped expel ISIS forces from the Syrian city of Kobani in January, and are fighting ISIS forces near Mosul, Iraq, and Sinjar Mountain, the site of a dramatic siege this summer by militants of ethnic minority Yazidis.

Jordan:The country initially joined in airstrikes against ISIS but suspended its participation when one of its aircraft went down in Syria, leading to the capture of pilot Lt. Moath al-Kasasbeh. The kingdom resumed its attacks in February after ISIS released a video depicting the pilot being burned to death in a cage.

Netherlands:The Dutch government sent F-16 fighter jets to bomb ISIS targets and troops to help train Kurdish forces. As of early February, Dutch warplanes had conducted nearly 300 strikes on ISIS targets, the Defense Ministry said.