The rise, fall, and rise again of Islamic State
Just because Donald Trump declared ‘we’ve won’ does not mean the terror group Islamic State has been defeated, but the reality is far from that with a renewed and expanding threat by the jihadists The reality on the ground, however, not only in Syria and
MOQTAZ will never forget the day they came to his office looking for his two friends.
“They had their names on a list, I don’t know why but they took them away,” he tells me.
We are in a clinic in the backstreets of the Iraqi city of Mosul. Inside the dingy room, where we both sit, along with his psychiatrist, there is a pause, as Moqtaz seems momentarily to withdraw into himself.
“They were my best friends as well as work colleagues, we had known each other as boys from primary school age,” he continues.
“I still see their bodies, the blood, my friends now unrecognisable,” he tells me, concluding the story of that day when some hours later the armed fighters of the Islamic State (IS) group returned.
With them they brought the decapitated corpses of his friends, before dumping them in front of Moqtaz and a few of the young victims’ family members who had gathered at the office to await news about the fate of their loved ones. Today, not surprisingly, Moqtaz still suffers from the trauma of that terrible moment.
It was over two years ago now when Moqtaz lost his friends. It was earlier this month though that Iraqis marked the first anniversary of their costly victory over IS, or Isis as it is sometimes known.
It was a victory of sorts that came after a gruelling three-year war in which tens of thousands of people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced as entire towns and neighbourhoods were reduced to rubble in the fighting.
I say victory of sorts, not only because of this devastation but because Iraq, like neighbouring Syria and elsewhere in the world, still confronts the lingering menace of IS which once again is making its brutal presence felt.
“We’ve won,” claimed President Donald Trump last week, insisting that IS had been defeated and it was time to bring US troops home from Syria. The reality on the ground, however, not only in Syria and Iraq but in places as far-flung as West Africa to Afghanistan and Western Europe is that the threat of IS continues to loom large and in many places is growing by the day.
On Christmas Day members of IS stormed into several villages on the outskirts of Iraq’s disputed oil-rich province of Kirkuk, kidnapping at least 19 people.
In an increasingly familiar tactic, among the abductees was a local leader or Mukhtar who IS accused of collaborating with security forces and other Iraqi authorities.
According to local residents, similar abductions took place over the past few weeks, and most of those kidnapped were taken to “Zaghitun Valley,” a vast area that Iraqi forces announced had been cleared from IS sleeper cells earlier in the year.
This sleeper cell network, both in Iraq and Syria, has become the hallmark of IS’s latest tactics and is reminiscent of those used by the jihadist group in the years before it declared its self- proclaimed caliphate.
At its height this saw it control a territorial area roughly the size of Britain with 10 million people under its rule.
But just as the physical territory it once held has shrunk following major military operations against it, so IS has adapted to the pressure by returning to its roots and becoming a guerrilla insurgency.
Indeed, it speaks volumes about Trump’s failure to take notice of his own advisers that barely weeks before his abrupt decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, a report by his own Department of Defence warned that an “effective, clandestine IS organisation appears to be taking hold” almost four years after the group controlled swathes of Syria and as much as a third of Iraq.
Today, counter-terrorism officials in describing IS speak of an “atomised, clandestine network of cells with a decentralised chain of command”.
According to the US-based institute for research and analysis, the Jamestown Foundation, the current IS strategy in Syria has utilised networks of locals and middlemen.
In March, IS, in anticipation of these changing circumstances on the ground, is said to have dissolved the body responsible for its management and transformed it into a new entity called “the war affairs committee”.
“Analysts believe that this committee structured their sleeper cell hierarchy. It reportedly appointed a leader for each cell; armed and funded the cells; and instructed them to stay dormant until further notice,” reports the Jamestown Foundation. With this transformation,
the structure of IS effectively went back to where it was before the “Caliphate declaration” but with more organisation and significantly more resources.
This question of IS’s resources is also a crucial point. For just as it has lost territory, so too has it lost some of its vast income from oilfields in Iraq and Syria that once helped it become the world’s richest terrorist group.
But as Rukmini Callimachi, a correspondent with The New York Times and an acknowledged expert on IS pointed out, the jihadists are also adopting a retrograde approach to their fundraising. “I was just in Baghdad a couple of weeks ago, and I met with coalition officials and unfortunately the number that they were citing for how much money Isis still has on hand, just in Iraq and Syria, is over $300 million (£235m). So that gives you a sense of just how wealthy this terrorist group is,” says Callimachi.
The question of IS’s resources is a crucial point. For just as it has lost territory, so too has it lost some of its vast income from oilfields in Iraq and Syria that helped it become the world’s richest terrorist group
According to interviews conducted with activists by Jamestown Foundation analysts, IS over the years managed to develop strategic relationships with middlemen who would make lucrative deals for it with an organised system for revenue.
Even prior to the US-led coalition operations to oust the jihadists from their self-proclaimed capital, the Syrian city of Raqqa, IS packed substantial quantities of gold and money in crates, loaded it into trucks and relocated.
Weapons including heavy weaponry such as missiles were moved and hidden in the desert. Today, as IS resurrects itself, it earns the bulk of its revenue from extortion and front companies, including car dealerships to currency exchanges.
“They are now going back to the types of fundraising that they were doing before, namely illegal taxation in areas that they do not control, coming into areas and telling businesses if you don’t pay up, like the mafia, if you don’t pay you’re going to face the consequences,” Callimachi says.
“This is a group that has known how to finance itself without territory for over a decade. So I don’t expect them to go bankrupt any time soon,” she adds.
In effect, the group has changed from a so-called “state” to smaller cells transforming its institutions into entities that allow the group to continue managing its operations.
In other places across the world this shift to a guerrilla insurgency is being repeated.
Around the same time that IS fighters in Iraq were launching attacks over Christmas, Libya Province, a local arm of IS’s franchise in that country, claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on the Libyan foreign ministry’s headquarters in Tripoli. It was the latest blow to efforts to stabilise the war- ravaged
North African nation and underscored IS’s presence there.
While IS, just as in Syria and Iraq, has been forced to withdraw from the towns and cities it held in Libya to regroup in the south, here, too, it is showing considerable resilience.
The measure of this is apparent from a series of attacks including an assault on the Libyan National Oil Corp headquarters in Tripoli in September.
That same month, Ghassan Salame, special representative of the UN secretary-general and head of mission of the UN Support Mission i n Libya (UNSMIL), warned the UN Security Council that “IS’s presence and operations in Libya are only spreading”.
He went on to say that Libya was in danger of turning into “a shelter for terrorist groups of all persuasions”.
And just as IS is alive and well in Libya, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, so too is it thriving in sub-Saharan Africa.
There the jihadists also draw their strength, not necessarily from control of territory but from their ability to build ties to populations made vulnerable by governance failures and war.
In Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and, of course, in Nigeria they are active.
In the case of the latter country, fighters linked to IS’s West Africa Province (ISWAP) hoisted their flag in the Nigerian fishing town of Baga after overrunning it on Wednesday night and are now said to be using drones against the Nigerian army.
As most IS watchers will confirm, the transnational flow of fighters remains a major sustaining factor in such IS activities globally.
“Typically each wave of militancy draws on the last one and given the size of the Islamic State’s streams of outside supporters, one can expect the next cause to have large pre-existing networks that would help publicise the cause, connect fighters, and otherwise facilitate a movement,” says Daniel L Byman, senior fellow at the Centre for Middle East Policy.
All of which has profound implications right here on our European doorstep.
Earlier this month, Jurgen Stock, the head of Interpol, warned that Europe is facing a new wave of terrorism as radicalised individuals return and jihadists are released from jail.
“We could soon be facing a second wave of other Islamic State-linked or radicalised individuals that you might call Isis 2.0.
Interpol is said to have a database of about 45,000 suspected foreign jihadists but said that locating them was a challenge for police and security agencies.
“The so-called returnees are still a concern for many member countries,” he said. “Many of those who left, for instance from Europe or Asia, have not yet returned.
“Some of them have been killed on the battlefield but some of them are missing,” Stock said, speaking recently to the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris.
“The s e c ur i t y a gencies are concerned about when they are coming back because most of them are battle hardened, they are trained and they are internationally connected,” he continued.
“Remember, fighters from more than 100 countries went to the conflict zones. This was a huge opportunity to network on an international level and, of course, these contacts still exist and we shouldn’t forget that,” Stock stressed.
Among many in the counter-terrorist community the hope is that through a mix of more aggressive policing, giving aid to anti- jihadist regimes, border control, internet vigilance, and other measures, it will make it harder for any new group to succeed on the scale that IS has previously.
In light of this it’s not surprising that Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria engaged in fighting
IS is alive and well in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan and so too is it thriving in subSaharan Africa. There the jihadists draw their strength not necessarily from territory, but from building ties to populations
Isis is seen as handing the jihadists a get-out-of-jail card.
What a contrast in response there was last week in France to the news of the US pullout.
As a leading member of the US-led coalition fighting IS in Syria and Iraq, France has special forces based in the north of the country, deployed alongside Kurdish and Arab forces, and carries out air strikes against the group.
France is also especially sensitive to the IS threat after several major deadly attacks on its soil and its officials are under no illusion as to the threat the jihadists continue to pose after French nationals joined the group in Syria. “Islamic State has not been wiped from the map nor have its roots. The last pockets of this terrorist organisation must be defeated militarily once and for all,” the French defence minister Florence Parly said on Twitter.
Another anonymous French presidency source, speaking to the Reuters news agency, was far more blunt.
“He (Trump) is cutting corners, risking a serious accident ... the coalition’s spine is the United States,” the source said.
Anyone with even a modicum of strategic and tactical nous would find it hard to disagree with such an assessment.