ISIS attacks in the West drop sharply

The attacks seemed to come one after another: 130 dead on the floor of the Bataclan concert hall and on the streets of Paris. Eighty-six mowed down on Nice’s historic promenade. Twenty-two people, many of them teenage girls, killed at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.

Since the lightning rise of the Islamic State group in 2014, law enforcement has scrambled to stop an endless array of plots. It is only now, more than four years after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his caliphate, that the cadence has finally slowed.

Islamic State attacks in the West fell steeply in 2018 compared with the previous four years, the first time the number has fallen since 2014. But the number of attempted attacks remained steady, suggesting the group remains committed to carrying out catastrophic harm.

The difference, analysts say, is that law enforcement is increasingly foiling the plots.

The Islamic State remains the world’s deadliest terrorist organization, and its attacks are on the rise in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. But in the West, not only has the number of attacks plummeted, but the devastation inflicted by each has also declined.

The Islamic State carried out 14 successful attacks in Europe and North America in 2015, 22 in 2016 and 27 in 2017, according to data collected by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. But in the first eight months of this year, it only carried out four.

“It’s an absolutely dramatic dip,” said the program’s director, Lorenzo Vidino.

The scale of attacks has also fallen. The largest toll in a single attack fell from 130 in 2015, to 86 in 2016, to 22 at the pop concert in Manchester in 2017. So far in 2018, the worst single-day toll was in the aisles of a supermarket in Trèbes, France, where a man acting in the name of the Islamic State gunned down three people in March.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has lost 99 percent of the land it once held in Iraq and Syria, and the fight to evict it from the last vestige started this week. Some analysts have linked the drop in activity to the loss of territory.

But the number of attempted attacks in Europe has remained unchanged, according to data collected by the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism in Paris. That data suggest that while the Islamic State’s capacity may have been diminished, its effort has not.