ISIS Militants Escape To Fight on Another Day
WASHINGTON — Thousands of Islamic State foreign fighters and family members have escaped the American-led military campaign in eastern Syria, according to new classified American and other Western military and intelligence assessments, a flow that threatens to tarnish American declarations that the militant group has been largely defeated.
As many of the fighters f lee unfettered to the south and west through Syrian Army lines, some have gone into hiding near Damascus, the Syrian capital, and in the country’s northwest, awaiting orders sent by insurgent leaders on encrypted communications channels.
Other militants, some with training in chemical weapons, are defecting to Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria. Others are paying smugglers tens of thousands of dollars to take them across the border to Turkey, to return home to their European countries.
The assessments come despite a concerted effort to encircle and “annihilate” — as United States Defense Secretary Jim Mattis put it — Islamic State fighters in Raqqa, the group’s self-proclaimed capital, which fell in the autumn, and pursue other insurgents who fled south into the Euphrates River Valley toward the border with Iraq.
Analysts say they are also seeing signs that Islamic State fighters are adopting guerrilla tactics.
“The group is transitioning into an underground organization that places more weight on asymmetric tactics, like suicide bombings against soft targets in government- secured areas like Baghdad,” said Otso Iho, a senior analyst at Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center at IHS Markit in London.
Mr. Iho cited an attack by two suicide bombers in Baghdad last month that killed three dozen people and injured 90 more.
American and other Western intelligence and counterterrorism analysts put the number of escaped fighters in the low thousands. Many are traveling with spouses and children.
The United States military is concerned that a Turkish offensive against the Kurdish- dominated Syrian Democratic Forces in Afrin, in northern Syria, has worsened the problem. The S.D.F. has been working with the Americans in former Islamic State-held areas to interdict fleeing jihadists, but those efforts have been greatly reduced as the Kurds have shifted resources to reinforce Afrin.
Of the more than 5,000 Europeans who joined the Islamic State, as many as 1,500 have returned home.
Ahmad Ramadan, the head of the Euphrates Center Against Violence and Terrorism in Istanbul, said the Islamic State was still in many villages east of the Euphra- tes River — the informal demarcation line between Russian-backed Syrian troops to the west and American-backed Syrian militias to the east. “ISIS nowadays are spreading all over Syria,” he said.
According to the British- based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, senior Islamic State operatives from Raqqa and Deir al-Zour, in the Euphrates River Valley, have paid bribes of $20,000 to $ 30,000 for safe passage into Turkey.
“I smuggled about 50 ISIS fighters into Turkey,” said Abu Omar, a smuggler between Syria and Turkey, in a WhatsApp message. “They were wearing cool clothes, classic jeans with many necklaces, trying to disguise as much as they can. They hid their passports in their boots. They were completely shaved; you never guess they are ISIS. They didn’t speak any Arabic, few words.”