KEY FACTORS TO EXAMINE
1 First, the forces opposing IS are, in some cases, almost equally opposed to each other (Turkey, for example, is fighting both IS and Peshmerga troops) and are now competing to establish their own areas of influence in Syria.
This could result in the effective dismembering of Syria and will leave the deeply disaffected Sunnis, who formed the core of the support for IS, scattered across the ruins of their devastated land and more embittered than ever.
No one can afford the cost of reconstruction (the estimate for rebuilding Iraq is over US$100 billion, and it could be much higher for Syria), so people will live in squalor and misery for many years to come. Turkey will continue to fight to prevent Kurdish autonomy; Iran will extend its reach far across the region, which Saudi Arabia will try to prevent at almost any cost; Russia will demand loyalty from the al-Assad government in Syria; and IS commanders are leaving sleeper cells behind to sabotage all attempts at progress.
So the end of the current phase of the ground war in Syria will leave an extraordinarily complex conflict between Sunni and Shia, the minority Assad regime (with Russian support) and a range of internal factions, the Turks and the Kurds, and the Iranians and the Saudis. This struggle is likely to spread far beyond the region, drawing in both state and non-state actors in a war that now appears to be unstoppable.
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Second, the threat from terrorism is increasingly fluid and complex. Terrorism usually has some ideological or religious rationale, but it is also driven by a number of deep and almost intractable problems, including the conflict between the Sunni and Shia faiths, the US invasion of Iraq and the disbanding of the Iraqi army, Saudi Arabia’s support for Wahhabi Sunni imams, the complex, multisided and cross-border war with its current epicentre in Syria, and a large number of local conflicts and grievances, many of which found common cause and expression through IS.
None of these problems are likely to be resolved in the foreseeable future, and many of them are metastasising, moving into new territories (especially ungovernable provinces and weak states) and evolving into new forms (such as cyberspace), which means that the associated terrorism is likely to persist for decades to come.
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Third, to make the situation even worse, part of the Middle East and North Africa (the region includes 22 countries with nearly 400 million inhabitants) could gradually become
uninhabitable as a result of climate change. The availability of fresh water in the region has fallen by two-thirds over the past 40 years to just one-tenth of the world average, and it is expected to fall a further 50 per cent by 2050.
Rising temperatures and water shortages will force migration, which is likely to result in a further surge of terrorist activity, fuelled by rage at the destruction of entire nations.
4Fourth, the threat is increasingly difficult to pattern or predict because the enemy is no longer a single entity. IS, for example, is simultaneously an organisation, a selfproclaimed state, the core of a network of affiliated organisations and sympathetic individuals, a religious and political belief system, and a malignant ideology that is being disseminated around the world on a multiplicity of media and social channels.
The deadliest mass shooting in United States history, the killing of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, was by a man who appears to have been motivated largely by his own psychological turmoil, but he pledged allegiance to IS shortly before carrying out the attack. As this suggests, many disturbed individuals now identify with the uncompromising cruelty and destructiveness of IS, which gives IS ready access to willing recruits.
5Fifth, IS is prepared to fight a long war. They see themselves as actors in a conflict that started 1,400 years ago, so the loss of their remaining territory in Iraq and Syria would only be a temporary setback. They are already prepared to revert to operating as a regional insurgency and international terrorist network, focusing on small-group and lone-wolf attacks in ‘hostile’ nations, organised mainly through personal connections, prisons and gang networks, and social media.
6Sixth, there is an increasing overlap between criminal and terrorist networks. Many terrorist organisations run extensive criminal enterprises and source weapons, money-laundering services, and computer hacking skills from other criminals. More recently, a number of criminal organisations have claimed to be part of terrorist networks.
In the Philippines, for example, criminal clans such as Maute and Abu Sayyaf, based in the island of Mindanao, have affiliated themselves to IS. They probably don’t have a genuine connection to IS, but claiming that they did helped them to terrorise the population to the point where 400,000 people fled. As this shows, IS is now like a franchise that local criminals can use to greatly extend their power and influence.