INSIDE ISLAMIC STATE’S GLOBAL NETWORK OF TERROR
LOSING GROUND IN IRAQ AND SYRIA, ISIS IS NOW SAID TO BE OPERATING FROM A POSITION OF WEAKNESS, BUT AS FOREIGN EDITOR DAVID PRATT REVEALS, THE JIHADISTS HAVE DEVELOPED AN INTRICATE WORLDWIDE NETWORK OF VIOLENCE FROM ORLANDO TO NICE AND ISTANBUL
THEY call it “a message in blood”. It is more than two years now since the Islamic State (IS) group’s propaganda section posted a video message with this sinister title showing the beheading of a Kurdish man. Since then there has been an endless stream of similar grisly bulletins by this jihadist organisation whose operational tentacles are increasingly reaching out to cause havoc across the globe.
It was just over two months ago that IS’s slick propaganda machine released yet another message. This time it was an audio statement by the group’s chief spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani “celebrating” the upcoming holy month of Ramadan.
Make it “a month of calamity everywhere for the non-believers”, exhorted al-Adnani who in the past has acted as an online recruiting sergeant encouraging would-be fighters to come to the caliphate territories of Syria and Iraq. His message on this occasion, however, was a very different one. In it he urged supporters to stay at home and cause mayhem. It was to prove an ominous portent of the horrific events to come and that continue to play out across the world.
Since al-Adnani’s call to arms, terrorists acting in IS’s name have struck in over 10 countries. Across the world from Istanbul to Dhaka, Orlando to Baghdad, Nice to Bavaria, airports, restaurants, train stations, night clubs and shopping centres have been targeted and the death toll has risen as IS delivers its bloody global messages.
Only yesterday in the Afghan capital, Kabul, another attack horrifyingly highlighted IS’s increasing global reach and aim of widening sectarian divisions. At least 60 people were killed and over 200 wounded, mainly ethnic Hazaras who are predominately Shia Muslims. Some in the West have claimed these recent IS attacks indicate the organisation is operating from a position of weakness spurred by its mounting losses of personnel and territory in Iraq and Syria.
“Isil and its leaders have retreated to the shadows,” insisted Brett McGurk, US Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter Isil, Washington’s preferred acronym for the jihadist group.
“The morale ... is plummeting. We’re seeing them execute their own fighters on the battlefield. We’re seeing them unable to move fighters around the battlefield. We’re seeing the recruits fall off precipitously,” added McGurk recently.
Evidence would suggest there is some accuracy in this assessment. Intelligence analysts say that both open source and classified data points to the fact that IS is down to between 18,000 to 22,000 fighters from an estimated high of 33,000 last year.
Since the height of IS advance across its self-declared caliphate in 2014 it has lost 50 per cent of the terrain it once held in Iraq and upwards of 20 per cent of what it once controlled in Syria. It has other challenges to contend with, too. With the loss of many key Syria-Turkey smuggling routes fewer arms are getting through. This and the killing of one senior or mid-level leader once every three days has undoubtedly impacted on their military capabilities. The dwindling number of foreign fighters is another tell-tale sign of the changing nature of the group. Two years ago a monthly salary of $1,000 and free accommodation, food and transport drew many foreigners to Iraq and Syria. Even the wives and children were provided with a stipend of $50 and $25 respectively.
Today, a financial strain – partly caused by the coalition’s bombing of the oil facilities captured by the group – has seen foreign fighters’ monthly salaries reduced to $400 and the number of foreigners decrease by about 10,000 individuals. On all major battlefield fronts in the cities of Raqqa in Syria, Fallujah in Iraq and Sirte in Libya, the jihadists have found themselves being rolled back even if they continue to put up fierce resistance. Right now, Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, remain the group’s last major urban holdouts. But as local and coalition forces consolidate their gains, eating away at IS-controlled territory, there is growing concern in many Western ranks over the knock-on effect beyond the region. For its part IS leadership appears undaunted.
“Will we lose if you control Mosul, Raqqa and other cities that were previously controlled by us? No, because defeat is only the loss of the wish and will to fight,” IS spokesman al-Adnani declared a few months ago as the group came under increasing pressure. Al-Adnani was also quick at the time to reiterate the group’s slogan, “Remaining And Expanding.”
It is that expanding element that now worries counter-terrorism officials. Clearly, IS has no intention of slowly fading away, and instead has been shifting its focus to ensure it remains the world’s most potent terrorist threat. CIA director John Brennan painted a bleak picture for members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee recently warning that even a considerably degraded IS has the resilience, the manpower and the financial resources to strike at enemies both in the Middle East and in the West.
“Our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach,” Brennan said. “As the pressure mounts on Isil, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.”
A key part of those efforts will be to make further strikes at Western targets along the lines of IS operations in Paris and Brussels, as well as inspiring attacks like the shooting, truck and axe strikes in Orlando, Nice and Bavaria.
“Isil is training and attempting to deploy operatives,” Brennan confirmed, stressing there were still plenty of avenues by which fighters from the West could return to their own countries. According to the CIA chief, among the options was joining the flow of refugees, taking advantage of smuggling routes and even sending terrorists back to the West using “legitimate methods of travel”. The IS aim is clearly to try to break modern states in a way that will cascade. Some states, especially those in the Middle East, are especially vulnerable to state collapse under the combined weight of terrorist attacks, refugee flows, and political deadlock.
Sensing this, IS made hits both on Jordan
and Lebanon during its Ramadan campaign knowing that both countries are already under considerable political duress. But what of those countries further afield that IS sees as both targets or ripe for infiltration. How does it go about orchestrating its operations in such places?
Terrorism analysts often take different positions on the extent to which IS was in control of recent operations. Some point to the fact that the group’s role was most likely limited to the level of only providing ideological inspiration and encouragement to socalled lone wolves or wolf packs, which may have mobilised in response to al-Adnani’s call to arms, but did not co-ordinate with IS operatives. The lone-wolf term can often be very misleading or misused.
Speaking after the recent truck attack in Nice by Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, former mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, pointed out: “Attacks aren’t pre- pared alone. There is a chain of complicity.”
Estrosi’s point is that too often there is a knee-jerk tendency to refer to such attacks as lone wolf before the full facts are known and any links the perpetrators might have are fully established.
Before he killed 49 people in a bloody rampage at an Orlando nightclub in Florida last month, Omar Mateen even went as far as to call 911 to establish his jihadi credentials. He pledged allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He referred to the Tsarnaev brothers, responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, as his “homeboys” and expressed solidarity with a Florida man who carried out a suicide attack in Syria. Despite this, in the hours following the attack, US officials said they had no evidence that Mateen was in any way directed from abroad and was merely a lone wolf. What is now in no doubt, however, is that Mateen had been inspired by IS and he had been radicalised in part through the internet.
This, say many counter-terrorism experts, indicates the significance of what have become known as “virtual planners” and how they manipulate so called lone-wolf attackers. While some IS global attacks such as the Istanbul and Baghdad bombings, were centrally directed by IS attack networks that deployed trained operatives, others were the product of collaboration between local networks and IS operatives based in Syria and Iraq, who help organise and co-ordinate attacks remotely. In other words, what terrorism experts call a combination of central and virtual planning.
But just who are these people – the “virtual planners” – who conduct this online nurturing of potential activists and help initiate and trigger attacks? According to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, chief executive of Valens Global, a consulting firm that focuses on the challenges posed by violent non- state actors, the IS Ramadan offensive bears the hallmark of the Amn al-Kharji, the IS’s shadowy external operations wing.
This section is responsible for planning, espionage activities and terrorist operations outside the caliphate’s core territory.
“Under the guidance of an enigmatic Frenchman known by his nom de guerre, Abu Sulayman al-Faransi, the Amn al-Kharji has built a robust infrastructure that enables it to co-ordinate and direct attacks across the globe,” says Gartenstein-Ross.
Al-Faransi, who is believed to have played an integral part in the planning of the November 2015 Paris attacks, directs a cadre of “theatre commanders” who are responsible for co-ordinating terrorist operations in different regions, including those as far afield as southeast Asia and Europe.
“These theatre commanders are the centre of gravity within the Amn al-Kharji and featured prominently in the Ramadan campaign, directing operations and providing guidance to local networks,” Gartenstein-Ross explains.
THE most detailed information on the Amn al-Kharji comes from an interview with an IS defector, known only as “Abu Khaled”. According to Abud Khaled, the Amn al-Kharji is one of four agencies that fall under IS’s amniyat, or security apparatus. Below al-Faransi in the Amn al-Kharji come the theatre commanders who are perhaps the most pivotal players in IS’s external operations as they serve as liaison officers between strategic planners and tactical operators.
Next to nothing is known about how many such positions exist within Amn al-Kharji, though the southeast Asia region is most likely under the command of Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian militant. In Europe, meanwhile, the theatre commander role is believed to be Salim Benghalem, another French national who became radicalised in a French prison when serving an earlier sentence for attempted murder, and whose involvement in jihadism predates IS’s emergence.
“The structure of IS’s Amn al-Kharji and the group’s tactics in the Paris and Brussels attacks make immediately clear that IS has fully professionalised its external operations … their activities are more akin to those of a state sponsor of terrorism than those of a non-state actor,” insists Gartenstein-Ross.
Addressing the US Senate Intelligence Committee on the issue of IS, the CIA’s Brennan was at pains to make clear that the agency’s efforts have not substantially reduced the reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach.
“Global instability is one of the defining issues of our time, and its implications are hard to overstate. As instability spreads, extremists and terrorists are finding sanctuary in ungoverned spaces,” said Brennan
That shadowy sanctuary of the covert terrorist underworld is the one most now expect IS to inhabit. On the back foot militarily it might be, but IS has shown itself more than capable in the past of metamorphosing as a terrorist entity. At its disposal there remains a considerable army of hardcore militants and sympathisers willing to do its bidding around the world.
More than ever the world community can expect the secretive work of Amn al-Kharji and theatre commanders to intensify. There will be more messages in blood, that much is certain.