With loss of ISIS caliphate, security forces brace for group’s return to guerrilla roots
Its de facto capital is falling. Its territory has shriveled from the size of Portugal to a handful of outposts. Its surviving leaders are on the run.
But rather than declare the Islamic State and its virulent ideology conquered, many Western and Arab counterterrorism officials are bracing for a new, lethal incarnation of the jihadi group.
The organization has a proven track record as an insurgency able to withstand major military onslaughts, while still recruiting adherents around the world ready to kill in its name.
Concern over sleeper cells
Islamic State leaders signaled more than a year ago that they had drawn up contingency plans to revert to their roots as a guerrilla force after the loss of their territory in Iraq and Syria. Nor does the group need to govern cities to inspire so-called lone wolf terrorist attacks abroad, a strategy it has already adopted to devastating effect in Manchester, England, and Orlando, Fla.
“Islamic State is not finished,” said Aaron Y. Zelin, who studies jihadi movements at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “IS has a plan, and that is to wait out their enemies locally in order to gain time to rebuild their networks while at the same time provide inspiration to followers outside to keep fighting their enemies farther away.’”
Even with the news on Tuesday that U.S.-backed forces said they had captured Raqqa, the capital of the group’s self-declared caliphate, European counterterrorism officials were worrying about sleeper cells that may have been sent out well before the battlefield losses mounted.
In Iraq, where the group that became the Islamic State took root, security officials are bracing for future waves of suicide attacks against civilians. And even if governments are able to head off organized plots like the Paris attacks of 2015, officials around the globe concede that they have almost no way of stopping lone wolf assaults inspired or enabled by Islamic State propaganda.
“It is clear that we are contending with an intense U.K. terrorist threat from Islamist extremists,” Andrew Parker, the director of Britain’s MI5 intelligence service, said in a speech on Tuesday. “That threat is multidimensional, evolving rapidly, and operating at a scale and pace we’ve not seen before.”
The group’s ability to weld religious fervor to the political resentments of disenfranchised Sunni Muslims in Shiite-dominated Iraq already saved it once, when it appeared broken by the U.S. military surge in Iraq in 2007 and 2008.
By the time U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011, intelligence officials estimated that the Islamic State’s predecessor, then called the Islamic State of Iraq, was down to its last 700 fighters. The group was considered such a minor threat that the reward offered by the United States for the capture of its leader plummeted from $5 million to $100,000.
It took less than three years for those beaten-down and diminished insurgents to regroup and roar across Iraq and Syria, declaring an Islamic caliphate from the Mediterranean coast of Syria nearly to the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. It became both the world’s wealthiest terrorist group, and the most feared.
Social media strength
Even with the loss of most of that territory, the organization is far from defeated. The group currently has from 6,000 to 10,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria, the U.S.-led coalition said on Friday. That is eight to 14 times the number it had in 2011.
“That’s the relevant comparison,” said Daniel L. Byman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy, who tracks jihadi groups. “This is a very strong group which has a lot of sympathizers, its ideas are embedded and it has networks. It has a lot to draw on even as it loses its physical territory.”
The group has also developed a powerful social media network that with no physical presence allows it to spew propaganda, claim responsibility for terrorist attacks, and not just inspire attacks but also help plot and execute them remotely.
It is also premature to assert that the Islamic State is running out of territory. While its footprint has shrunk in Iraq and Syria, it still controls close to 4,000 square miles along the Euphrates River Valley on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border. U.S. and Iraqi military commanders believe the group’s core leaders have gone to ground in the largely barren areas along the border.
At the same time, ISIS branches in North Africa and Asia are still launching operations, and its camps in eastern Afghanistan remain largely intact, despite recent U.S. airstrikes.