Includes bibliographical references (pages 65-71).
Contents:
Introduction -- The MERV in Perspective -- Assessing the Region's Critical Needs -- Navigating the MERV's Geopolitical Complexities -- Conclusions and Recommendations.
Summary:
The U.S.-led international coalition to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has achieved substantial progress over the past several years, but the counter-ISIS campaign is not over. The authors assessed humanitarian needs in Eastern Syria's Middle Euphrates River Valley (MERV). They also examined how locally focused stabilization efforts might be orchestrated to help preclude the Islamic State's recapture of territory, even as Syria's larger civil conflict continues unabated and is growing more complex. This report opens with a sociocultural perspective on the MERV's human terrain, explicating long-standing divisions within and among the Valley's Sunni Arab tribes that may pose challenges to restoring broadly accepted local governance. The authors then assess the region's most urgent post-ISIS needs, focusing intensively on the status of its critical infrastructure-e.g., bridges, hospitals, transit facilities-as well as its natural resources, human displacement, and economic activity. In the political sphere, the authors examined how stabilization efforts might be pursued in a region where both the Syrian government and nonstate actors are filling a vacuum left by a common enemy's loss of territorial control. The authors then analyzed the pluses and minuses of attempting to overcome these challenges via either a separated division of labor approach to stabilization (i.e., a "steer clear" approach) or a more collaborative "interactive" approach. The authors recommend that both sides should start with a minimalist steer clear option but incrementally move toward a more interactive approach, as conditions permit.
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