It has been a little over four years since experts in March 2019 declared the terrorist group ISIS territorially defeated, with Kurdish forces taking its last pocket of land in the village of Baghouz, eastern Syria.
In the following months and years, the remains of the terror group suffered continuous blows, including the death of the first ISIS caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who detonated a suicide belt during a US-led military operation code-named Operation Kayla Mueller in October 2019.
A string of high-profile airstrikes targeted senior members of the group following his suicide. The most recent was the attack that killed former ISIS leader Abu Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi in November 2022, which led to the appointment of now-leader Abu al-Hussain.
😏 🔞
The moment the leader of ISIS Abu Al-Hassan Al-Hashemi Al-Qurashi was killed in southern #Syria in an operation carried out by the Syrian armed opposition.#سوريا#درعا pic.twitter.com/zoGqBIrmie
— Mohammed Al-Hawsawi (@musa31_md) December 2, 2022Experts speaking to Al Arabiya English said the present-day threat of the terror organization – which dominated global headlines at its height in 2013 for its brutal and devastating worldwide terror attacks – has never been lower – but have voiced concern about the rise of ‘ISIS 2.0.’
‘ISIS leftovers’
Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Al Arabiya English there are “ISIS leftovers” in hiding.
“They are – you could say – maybe incubating, the phrase that you might use when a seed wants to survive over a cold winter. It develops a hot outer casing in spring that softens, and you know that it starts to interact with the earth and come alive again. That might be what it’s doing,” Knights said.
Threat of ‘ISIS 2.0’
Professor Bruce Hoffman, a Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations, said ISIS will always remain a threat because of their unwavering ideology.
“Territory and terrorism have never been coterminous,” he told Al Arabiya English. “A sustaining ideology and compelling narrative are all that is needed. And ISIS retains them both.”
“Even though we may see ISIS’s appeal fading, since the defeat of the Caliphate, it has been able to either attract or co-opt groups in such far-flung places as Mozambique and Sri Lanka–where ISIS never had a presence before, but where local groups still found value in hitching their fortunes to ISIS’s star however much we may think it is falling or has fallen.”
While little is known about what happened to ISIS’ fighters after the Caliphate fell, Homan points out that, given that they had a cadre of foreign fighters numbers upwards of 40,000 at its height, “we can be sure many escaped.”
He added: “The attraction of terrorism is that a handful of persons can have a disproportionate impact. Even a tenth of that number surviving and fleeing elsewhere is alarming.”
“ISIS is like the Manson Family (a commune, gang, and cult led by criminal Charles Manson) compared to al-Qaeda, which is like the Mafia. Al Qaeda is in business to survive. ISIS is in business to kill,” he said.
To prevent an ‘ISIS 2.0’, Hoffman warns the world needs to continue to take the threat of ISIS seriously and resist the inclination to declare victory and forget about ISIS as the US did when it left Iraq in 2010 and created the conditions for ISIS to rise again.
“In terms of capabilities today compared with the time of the Caliphate, they (ISIS) are clearly weakened. But their intention and more importantly their capacity to inflict pain and suffering through violence is undiminished.”
Hoffman pointed to the massacre on April 21, 2019, Easter Sunday, when a series of coordinated ISIS-related terrorist suicide bombings targetted three churches in Sri Lanka and three luxury hotels in the capital Colombo.
“(These) bombings are precisely a case in point,” he said. “Unexpected attacks in a novel venue that inflicted mass casualties.”
He continued, “That is the power ISIS retains and the threat they pose.
When ISIS began
ISIS’ roots are in the terror group al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which was started in 2004 by Jordanian extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian, took over after a US airstrike killed Zarqawi in 2006. He then announced the creation of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq. The group added Syria to its name later, making it ISIS.
A US-Iraqi operation killed al-Masri in 2010. This allowed al-Baghdadi to take over the terrorist group. Members of the group later went to fight in Syria against government forces when the civil war broke out in 2011.
In 2014, the group controlled several major cities in Syria and Iraq.
At its height, ISIS reigned over a realm the size of Britain and waged attacks in Turkey, Lebanon, France, Belgium, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Tunisia, Kuwait – and notably Iraq.
In just two years, from 2014, ISIS-linked violence killed at least 18,802 civilians in Iraq, a United Nations report said at the time. The group forced millions of others from their homes and enslaved thousands more.
But by 2017, ISIS lost control of its major strongholds, with the announcement of its defeat in 2019. What remained of the terrorist group were simply small enclaves in the deserts and remote regions, where valleys and gorges remained the hideout of the remaining fighters.
But what remains of the ISIS group?
Warnings have filtered in over the years. These include warnings from think tanks like the Wilson Center that ISIS “continues to be a highly active and lethal insurgent force in the Middle East, particularly in rural Iraq and Syria” and headlines about the so-called Cubs of the Caliphate; children who were exploited by ISIS during the armed conflicts in its quasi-state within Iraq and Syria and created for the sole purpose to ensure the continuity of the Caliphate and to convey ISIS ideology and message to future generations all over the world.
However, Knights said that the threat of ISIS is at a record low.
The expert on ISIS in Iraq said security task forces around the world continue to keep an eye on the terror organization.
“We are always looking for signs of renewal or reawakening or transferring forces from one theater to another – particularly from Iraq, into Syria, or from Syria into Iraq. So, you know, a careful watch is what we’re doing now.”
However, Knights says data tracking shows “a real drop off in the number of ISIS attacks in Iraq and Syria to unprecedentedly low levels.”
Knights likens this to the fall of the militant organization the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) in Algeria in the early-2000s during the end of the Algerian Civil War.
“This is when the GSPC and its affiliates at that stage sort of collapsed into criminal gangs (that lived in remote areas). They sort of started to collapse into criminal networks.”
This is similar to the demise of ISIS in Iraq today, said Knights. However, he says the present-day threat of ISIS has diminished to its most historical levels.
Instead, the terror group – linked to some of the most notorious attacks across the globe – have resorted to more “basic” criminal acts.
From terrorism to ‘basic crime’
“What we do see is the ISIS soldiers in Iraq doing an increasing amount of kidnapping – the kidnapping of shepherds, and mushroom gatherers, and anyone who has to go to weird kinds of out-of-the-way places where they might be sheltering,” Knights told Al Arabiya English.
These kidnappings both serve as a warning for people to stay away from their enclaves – and serve as the group’s primary source of income, according to Knights.
“They ransom these hostages back to their families and use that as the primary way of making money,” he said. “And what this says to us is that this is very much an organization that is sort of running, hiding, trying to stay low profile, becoming semi-criminal and not really launching that many attacks of its own initiative.”
According to Knights, any ISIS-linked deaths in Iraq are “responsive” to Iraqi security forces carrying out rural patrols looking to stamp out the dwindling numbers of the terror group.
“Any killings are not – as we’ll call it – enemy-initiated actions.”
‘Historically-low threat’
It means ISIS-linked violence is “really historically low levels,” said Knights. “I mean, lower than we’ve ever seen since 2003, without a doubt, and so, as long as lower than the very first days of the insurgency. That suggests that this organization is deliberately in hibernation.”
Hiding in the shadows, like an undiagnosed cancer waiting to rear its ugly head, the threat of an ISIS resurgence cannot yet be discounted, Knights said.
“It’s just incapable or unwilling to expose itself and get killed because, you know, every time ISIS activity is detected, Iraq’s got more than enough forces now to go send the sweeping operation through that valley,” he added.
Knights estimates that ISIS is down to “a couple of hundred people” in Syria. “These are people who might actually kill someone who sort of is a combat element, so to speak. And in a country of, you know, over 35 million spread out quite a large set of areas, you know, that’s a very, very thin density because none of it is in the cities.”
This is compared to “thousands of insurgents in 2003,” Knights pointed out, adding: “And they’re getting picked off all the time because the Iraqi tribes are still doing a kind of a nonstop revenge program against the ISIS members.”
“We find tons of bodies all the time where they’ve been tied up and shot.”
Potential ‘regrouping’ in Syria’s refugee camps
While there is no “immediate threat” of ISIS returning as the global threat the extremist group was at its height, Knights said there is concern about a “regrouping” and training “next-generation ISIS members” in Syrian refugee camps.
“That (Syrian refugee camps) is the only geographic zone of control they have. And prisons, actually. We have seen ISIS recovery come out of prisons in the past, whether it was al-Qaeda – which kind of rebuilt itself in Yemeni prisons in the late 2000s, then in Iraqi prisons in the late 2000s. So, now it could rebuild itself to some extent in a refugee camp in Syria. But that is not a today or tomorrow threat.”
“This is a five-to-10-year threat that could mature if we don’t prevent a new generation of recruitment.”