As caliphate crumbles, ISIS cooks up new plans
The terrible terror attack in New York City this week — which seems to have ISIS ties — casts a dark shadow over the tremendous progress we’ve made of late in dismantling the Islamic State overseas.
ISIS is in crisis — pure and simple.
As you know, U.S.-supported, anti-ISIS coalition forces have recently taken back the Islamic State’s capital in Raqqa, Syria, and U.S.-backed Iraqi forces ousted ISIS from Mosul, Iraq, prior to that. That’s all great news. Indeed, terror attacks and foiled terror plots in the United States have fallen off dramatically this year. In 2014, the caliphate’s first year, we suffered two Islamist terror attacks and/or plots. In 2015, it spiked to 17, including the San Bernardino attack that killed 14 and seriously wounded 22 others.
Upping our fight in Syria and Iraq, Islamist terror attacks and plots here dropped slightly to 14 in 2016, the year of the Orlando nightclub attack, which killed 49 and wounded 58; this year, we’ve endured five plots or attacks, including this one in NYC, which resulted in the first, Islamist terror-related deaths here in 2017.
By my count, of those 38 Islamist plots or attacks, 30 were clearly ISIS-related. As such, I’m comfortable suggesting that putting more pressure on ISIS overseas recently has made us safer here at home.
But ISIS isn’t done for yet — unfortunately. We’re arguably entering a new phase of this war with new challenges to our security from the remnants of the Islamic State — not only its foot soldiers, but its violent Islamist ideology.
For example, ISIS’ leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is still unaccounted for. Under assault, he reportedly retreated from Mosul to Raqqa to somewhere in the Euphrates River Valley, where ISIS is still resisting.
He’s still very dangerous on many levels.
Even if Baghdadi were dead, the killing of Osama bin Laden didn’t mean al-Qaeda’s end. The terror group still exists years after bin Laden’s death and is quite active in spots, especially in Syria and Yemen.
ISIS will likely evolve from a terror army into a violent insurgency in Syria and Iraq — while continuing to look for new places to plan, train and operate in hopes of rekindling a caliphate and remaking the terror movement.
The other challenge, of course, is even if ISIS isn’t holding large tracts of land and subjugating millions of people to its evil will, we still have to deal with its persistent violent Islamist ideology, which spurs followers to commit atrocities against innocents.
ISIS will continue to recruit and radicalize people in place via the internet; they’ve already been “successful” in doing so, including suggesting ways to conduct attacks such as using vehicles as weapons.
More foreign fighters may return home to do damage, too.
As for us, we’re resilient, but we shouldn’t be calling this savage terror attack “the new normal.” I understand the sentiment — and I may have said it myself at one time or another — but we need to be concerned about complacency.
That model can’t be allowed to move into our mindset.
As the caliphate crumbles, we must be vigilant at home and keep the pressure on ISIS (and al-Qaeda) abroad. A lot of gains have been made, but we need to be ready for this post-caliphate phase so that what we perceive as “normal” is really “normal.”