Battered ISIS returns focus to insurgency
Militants play down loss of largest cities, churn out propaganda
BEIRUT — Three years ago, a black-clad cleric named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ascended a mosque pulpit in the Iraqi city of Mosul and addressed the world as leader of a new terrorist state.
The announcement of the caliphate was a high point for the extremist fighters of the Islamic State. Their exhibitionist violence and apocalyptic ideology helped them seize vast stretches of territory in Syria and Iraq, attract legions of foreign fighters and create an administration with bureaucrats, courts and oil wells. Now, their state is crumbling. In Syria, U.S.-backed militias have surrounded Raqqa, the group’s capital, and breached its historic walls. Across the border, Iraqi forces have seized the remains of the Mosul mosque where al-Baghdadi appeared and besieged the remaining jihadis in a shrinking number of city blocks.
But the loss of its two largest cities will not spell a final defeat for the Islamic State — also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh — according to analysts and U.S. and Middle Eastern officials. The group has already shifted back to its roots as an insurgent force, but one that now has an international reach and an ideology that continues to motivate attackers around the world.
“These are obviously major blows to ISIS because its statebuilding project is over, there is no more caliphate, and that will diminish support and recruits,” said Hassan Hassan, a senior fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Washington and a co-author of a book on the group. “But ISIS today is an international organization. Its leadership and its ability to grow back are still there.” Not yet homeless
The Islamic State has overshadowed its jihadi precursors like al-Qaida by not just holding territory, but by running cities and their hinterlands for an extended period, winning the group credibility in the militant world and allowing it to build a complex organization.
So even while its physical hold slips, its surviving cadres — middle managers, weapons technicians, propagandists and other operatives — will invest that experience in the group’s future operations.
And even though its hold on crucial urban centers is being shaken, the Islamic State is in no way homeless yet.
In Iraq, the group still controls Tal Afar, Hawija, other towns and much of Anbar province. In Syria, most of its top operatives have fled Raqqa in the past six months for other towns still under ISIS control in the Euphrates River valley, according to U.S. and Western military and counterterrorism officials who have received intelligence briefings.
Senior U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials say that more than 60,000 Islamic State fighters have been killed since June 2014, including much of the group’s leadership, and that the group has lost about two-thirds of its peak territory.
The Islamic State has carried out nearly 1,500 attacks in 16 cities across Iraq and Syria after they were freed from the militants’ control, showing that the group has reverted to its insurgent roots and foreshadowing long-term security threats, according to a study also published by the West Point center.
Internationally, the Islamic State has partly compensated for its losses at home by encouraging affiliates abroad — in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria and the Philippines — and by activating operatives elsewhere.
Between 100 and 250 ideologically driven foreigners are thought to have been smuggled into Europe from late 2014 to mid2016, nearly all through Turkey after crossing a now rigidly enforced border, European intelligence officials say.
But they may not be the most dangerous threat facing European authorities as long as Islamic State ideology continues to motivate attackers.
A recent study by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism examined 51 successful attacks in Europe and North America from June 2014, after the declaration of the caliphate, until June 2017, revealing that only 18 percent of the 65 attackers were known to have fought in Iraq or Syria.
Most were citizens of the countries they chose to strike. Caliphate lives on online
Since the Islamic State’s rise, the United States and its allies have focused on breaking the group’s control of territory, but much less planning has gone into how communities damaged by jihadi rule will be rebuilt and governed afterward. Indeed, the jihadis’ departure could accelerate other conflicts.
The caliphate also lives on in the virtual realm, as its operatives and supporters churn out propaganda, bomb manuals, encryption guides and suggestions for how to kill the largest number of people with trucks.
Its members have played down their losses, portraying them as mere setbacks in the long-term, worldwide battle against those who reject their ideology.
“O brothers, I call upon you to rise up wherever you are and to surround them and monitor them, then attack them and kill them,” a Chechen suicide bomber said in a video released posthumously last month. “The disbelievers have gathered today from every faith and attacked the caliphate, but this had only added to our faith and courage.”