Fight against Daesh stalls as group resorts to guerrilla tactics
Battlefield losses in Iraq and Syria force terrorists to rework their strategy
AUS-backed military offensive has stalled against Daesh’s last vestige in eastern Syria.
Booby traps, land mines and a militant counterstrike during a fierce sandstorm after the campaign began in September have knocked the coalition back on its heels.
And last week, the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdishled militia that is fighting Daesh with US help, suspended operations after Kurdish positions farther north were shelled by Turkey – not far from US advisers.
US diplomats and generals rushed to ease tensions with the Turks, who consider Kurdish fighters terrorists despite their partnership with the United States.
But the episode underscores the shifting nature of the fight against Daesh, a still-potent threat as it pivots from its battlefield losses in Iraq and Syria to directing guerrilla insurgencies in the Middle East and beyond.
“Although Daesh’s safe haven in Iraq and Syria has largely collapsed, its global enterprise of almost two dozen branches and networks, each numbering in the hundreds to thousands of members, remains robust,” Russell Travers, the acting head of the National Counterterrorism Centre, told senators in Washington last month.
Last week, Daesh claimed responsibility for an attack on a bus carrying Coptic Christians to a monastery in Egypt, which killed seven people and wounded 19 others. Dutch officials said in late September ■ they foiled a large, Daesh attack there.
In Jordan, state intelligence officials said they had worked closely with the CIA to thwart more than a dozen terrorist plots in the past several months in the Middle East and Europe. multisite
“Daesh remains an adaptive and dangerous adversary and is already tailoring its strategy to sustain operations amid mounting losses,” he said.
To be sure, thousands of Daesh members have been killed in US air strikes and partner actions. The extremist group now holds less than 1 per cent of the territory it seized in Iraq and Syria in 2014.
Network of cells
But Daesh has reverted to its insurgent roots — an atomised, clandestine network of cells with a decentralised chain of command, officials said.
The move follows plans that the extremist network drew up in the months before its main strongholds in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, fell to coalition forces last year.
“We’ve expected that as the physical caliphate went away, the remnants of this would attempt to revive themselves and revive their networks, and take on these insurgent, guerrillalike tactics,” Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the head of the military’s Central Command, said in an interview in Bahrain last week.