WASHINGTON, Dec 14, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Even as the last pockets of
resistance in eastern Syria hold their ground, the Islamic State group is
shapeshifting into a new, but no less dangerous, underground form, experts
warn.
Also known as ISIS, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the group had
long been ready to cede the territory it once held in its self-styled
“caliphate,” and has already begun the switch to a more clandestine role,
closer to its roots.
“ISIS anticipated its battlefield defeat and the loss of the caliphate and
prepared accordingly,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown
University in Washington.
“Hundreds of ISIS fighters were able to flee Syria, bribe their way through
Syria to Turkey and thereby disappear,” he said.
“Beneath the surface, ISIS has always played the long game.”
In a recent study entitled “ISIS’s Second Resurgence,” Brandon Wallace and
Jennifer Cafarella of the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War
(ISW) said the jihadist group “has already restructured its operations to
return to a regional insurgency.”
“ISIS is finding new sources of revenue and rebuilding command-and-control
over its scattered remnant forces in order to prepare for a future large-
scale insurgency in both Iraq and Syria,” the report said.
– ‘We’ll be back’ –
The group has managed to smuggle funds to several countries around the
Middle East, using front companies such as car dealerships, electronics
stores, pharmacies and currency exchanges that it established in Iraq,
experts said.
“We’re entering a very risky period,” said Seth Jones of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “I have no faith that ISIS has
been crushed, defeated.”
“They already have gone underground,” he said. “They are doing what
everybody does who faces a better equipped opposition, with air and naval
capabilities: they have to face Russian air strikes, cruise missiles.”
“What do you do in a case like that?” he said. “You disperse, you don’t
operate in platoon-size positions the way they did in 2014, you go
underground, you build your clandestine network, you conduct targeted
assassinations, IEDs [roadside bombs] and you wait for opportunities.”
Data collected by the CSIS show that in some provinces in Iraq, such as
Kirkuk in the northeast, the number of attacks attributed to IS doubled last
year from 2017, with an average of 75 a month.
The group has regularly picked off tribal leaders, government officials,
police and members of the armed forces.
In a television interview last month, the Iraqi Kurdish leader Massud
Barzani said that IS “is not defeated and will not be ended easily.”
“IS was on the ground, now they are underground,” Barzani said, noting that
they had returned to many areas they had been driven out of even stronger
than before.
An Islamic State fighter in Syria, who spoke to The New York Times via
WhatsApp, echoed Barzani’s grim message.
“Do you think the Americans can defeat the caliphate?” said the fighter,
who identified himself only as Yehya. “It’s a war of attrition. When the
coalition stops the air strikes, we will return immediately.”
“We didn’t leave for good. We’re still in Syria, even in the areas that you
think we left. We still have our suicide bombers ready to attack. Our
informers are active,” he said.
Hoffman agreed that the US and Russia are locked in a war of attrition
against the Islamists, “and frankly we’re losing it. There are nearly a
quarter of a million salafi-jihadi fighters all around the world.”
That is four times the number of jihadists there were in 2001, when Al-
Qaeda triggered the global “war on terror” with its jetliner suicide attacks
on the United States.
Hoffman said that while military operations may have held them at bay,
Islamic State operatives “carry within their own DNA the seeds to constantly
regenerate, to continue to attract, recruit.”
“Who would have thought in the immediate aftermath of September 11 that 17
years later, we would still be fighting?” he said.