There are increasing signs of the diminishment of ISIS’s territory, and even of the group's preparations for the expected collapse of its self-proclaimed caliphate. This was evidenced in statements by the group's leaders. In a sermon in late May, to mark the beginning of Ramadan, ISIS’s official spokesman, Abu Muhammad Al Adnani, seemed to prepare followers for the loss of the caliphate: “Would we be defeated and you be victorious if you were to take Mosul or Sirte or Raqqa or even take all the cities and we were to return to our initial condition? Certainly not!”
FIRST- Multiple Signs
In his final Pentagon press conference as Operation Inherent Resolve Commander, General Sean MacFarland, said ISIS is on the retreat on all fronts and that he is “100 per cent certain that ISIS will be eliminated as a governing entity in Iraq and Syria.”
General MacFarland’s confident remarks came amid the news that American-backed Libyan forces had captured ISIS strongholds in Sirte, Libya; a major victory against the satellite location of the terrorist group. Just a few days later, on August 13th, Syrian coalition forces liberated the city of Manbij, which sets the stage for an eventual attack to retake Raqqa, ISIS’s capital in Syria.
The U.S. State Department’s Counter-ISIS Coalition Envoy, Brett McGurk, echoed General MacFarland’s optimism in an appearance at The Aspen Security Forum in late July. McGurk said that by mobilizing the tribes of Iraq’s Anbar province, the coalition liberated Iraq’s entire Euphrates River Valley of ISIS. McGurk noted, “The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) have not lost a battle in the last year.”
In early July, the ISF recaptured Qayyarah Air Force Base located just 75 kilometers south of Mosul. Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, is ISIS’s capital in Iraq and a symbol of the Islamic Caliphate. Mosul’s liberation is now also a very achievable proposition. The liberation of Mosul is openly discussed as a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if.’ The former Iraqi Ambassador to the United States, Lukman Faily, even went as far as to say it is likely to happen this year.
The diminishment of ISIS’s territory is likely to impact its legitimacy. One of the group's distinguishing features is its claim that it will lead the anticipated battle between Muslim armies and their enemies. Its presence in Syria, a place of prophecy in Islam, helped the group promote this claim. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus is foretold to be the location where Jesus Christ (the second most important prophet in Islam) will return to defeat the Anti-Christ. Dabiq, a village in northern Syria and also the name of ISIS’s online magazine, is held to be the location of the apocryphal battle between Muslim armies and “the armies of Rome.”
That ISIS’s caliphate being built on sacred ground is both a strength and weakness. ISIS holds a huge mystique for potential recruits but has to bear the burden of continuing to expand its caliphate and achieving successive victories so as it would not lose legitimacy and see its religious claims collapsing.
SECOND- Back to Terrorism
The aforementioned signs indicate that ISIS's defeat is a matter of time. However, the question begs itself: Will a military defeat of the organization mean the end of ISIS?
The answer lies in previous experiences from 2008. Those who we know now as ISIS were originally “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” and the leading insurgent group during the American Occupation of Iraq in 2004, despite having no more than 5,000 men at their peak strength. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was halted in 2008 by the U.S. troop surge and the employment of Sunni Arab tribes in Anbar—known then as the “Anbar Awakening.” ISIS got its big break in 2011 when the United States withdrew from Iraq, and the then prime minister Nouri al-Maliki sought to weaken the Sunnis and the Awakening forces that fought against al-Qaeda. ISIS seized large swathes of territory because ISF opposition to ISIS’s expansion to Mosul and Fallujah in the summer of 2014 was fragile.
The civil war in Syria intensified in 2011, and Bashar Al-Assad lost the ability to control large swaths of Eastern Syria, creating a governance vacuum. The ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ deployed a military unit to Syria amid the civil war in 2011 and became the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.’ ISIS’s success in expanding in Iraq and Syria is less a story of aptitude than of opportunism as well as weakness of its enemies.
Moreover, the Counter-ISIS Coalition, comprised of 67 nations, was at a stalemate a year ago, but progress against ISIS since then has improved greatly. The Coalition beefed up its central paradigm of ‘train and equip, advise and assist’ while shifting away from counterinsurgency training and towards more conventional combined arms maneuver training. Cooperation on border control and information sharing has made it much harder for aspiring ISIS jihadists to travel around the world than was the case a year ago. The primary message went from ‘come join this historic and expanding caliphate’ to ‘stay home and fight in your home countries.’
As in 2008, ISIS will be taken down in 2016, but not out. Referring to the ISIS’s undoing in 2008, In his last public statement, Al Adnani asked “Were we defeated when we lost the cities in Iraq and were in the desert without any city or land?...Certainly not!” ISIS maintained relevance by conducting dramatic attacks in Iraq in the immediate years after 2008. Given its decentralized nature, we can expect a continuing pattern of attacks of varying degrees of organization when ISIS is once again beaten back in 2016.
THIRD- A Persistent Threat
In his final press conference, General McFarland declared that once Mosul is liberated, ISIS in Iraq will be diminished to “scattered pockets of resistance.” ISIS as a territorial caliphate will fall, but its fighters will continue to present a threat; either in the region or in their home countries. ISIS will revert to a Sunni jihadist terrorist organization, but with significantly improved operational capabilities that its fighters gained from fighting in Syria and Iraq.
“Military success in Iraq and Syria will not necessarily mean the end of Daesh,” declared General MacFarland. “We can expect the enemy to adapt more into a true insurgent force and terrorist organization, capable of horrific attacks, like the one here on July 3 in Baghdad and those others that we’ve seen around the world.” This is supported by Al Adnani's acknowledgment that ISIS might lose all its territory, but with a promise that it will bounce back, which means ISIS will carry out spectacular terrorist attacks to maintain its stance amongst terrorist organizations.
The difficulty in eliminating ISIS can be attributed to its creation of a self-proclaimed Islamic state, which will maintain their popularity, especially because it is the only extremist force that launched the most credible claim to Caliphate since the 1920’s, which means that the ISIS' popular enthusiasm will last until its supporters are dead. Al-Qaeda was created as an organization of select operatives carrying out terrorist organizations, whereas ISIS is a socio-political movement functioning like a flash mob.
A second reason for the emergence of ISIS and other extremist organizations in the region is that regional conflicts and unfavorable demographics means instability continues to be the norm in the aftermath of the Arab Spring of 2011, which was the outcome of a large youth demographic being unsatisfied with corrupt state governments that fail to bring about economic growth and provide basic services.
Despite the fact that, thankfully, an overwhelming majority of young Arabs reject ISIS and believe it will fail to establish a Caliphate, the group exploits existing problems. “The issue remains that Daesh, put another way, is a symptom of a growing disease that needs to be tackled, and not just the disease itself.”
FOURTH- Limited Choices
As ISIS continues to wither and fighters return home, the threat of ISIS terrorist attacks will remain high. The likelihood is that the Middle East, followed by Europe, will face the brunt of attacks once ISIS strongholds are dispersed.
The overwhelming occurrences of terrorist attacks with links to Islamist extremist groups occur in states witnessing sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. As a Sunni Islamic group with aspirations of statehood, ISIS’s main foes are the neighboring Shiite regimes in Iran, Syria, and Iraq. ISIS attacks Western countries when feasible, but most of those attacks are only loosely inspired by ISIS. Such attacks will be carried out by lone-wolves . Analysis of ISIS's terrorist attacks in Western countries shows that the majority of perpetrators are not closely linked to ISIS but are sympathizers.
On the other hand, the group will move to other strongholds. A political vacuum in the heart of Arabia allowed ISIS to momentarily flourish. There are still wide swaths of under-governed territory in the Middle East, and ISIS leadership could take short-term refuge in one of those places when it’s driven out of its hubs in Syria and Iraq.
Given the likelihood of protracted state failures in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and many other Middle Eastern states to a lesser degree, ISIS will find niches to occupy even after the liberation of Mosul and Raqqa. The risk of ISIS longer-term reemergence in the Levant will remain high, just as it was after 2008 in Iraq, as long as the causes that allowed the organization to expand, namely marginalization and alienation of some social segments, are not eliminated.
Victory in the fight against terrorism means degrading violent extremism until it becomes a manageable local crime issue. The lessons from Sirte and Anbar are that ISIS is doomed if the local population becomes intolerant to its presence. Until ISIS curbs its brutality against local populations, it will have no choice but to exist in ungovernable vacuums. Aside from the urban locales of Iraq and Syria, the vast deserts of the Sahel and the craggy nooks of the Sinai Peninsula both present opportunistic hideouts for ISIS core leadership as it seeks to take cover following its loss of strongholds in Syria, Iraq, and Sirte.
FIFTH- Al-Qaeda Poised to Re-Emerge
The diminishment of ISIS’s territory, and ultimately the end of the ISIS caliphate, means that al-Qaeda is poised to re-emerge as the premier jihadist brand. ISIS has been, more or less, deposed in Libya through military operations. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, ISIS’s spread was halted by rival jihadi groups, especially al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda also has stronger allegiances throughout Africa.
Some affiliates of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan shifted their allegiance to ISIS following its field successes/ victories in Syria and Iraq. ISIS won the allegiance of Boko Haram in 2015. Al-Qaeda in the Magreb and even Al Shabab in Somalia have pledged their allegiance to ISIS. However, no new collaboration or significant capacity seems to have emerged from these announcements. Rather, ISIS was the top dog and others fell in line. It is expected that once the caliphate falls, the pressure to align local jihadist brands to ISIS will surely fall too. Without the caliphate, ISIS faces no choice but returning to its prior status as a junior partner of Al Qaeda. Furthermore, some of its elements are likely to break away/ split from ISIS to join Al Qaeda.
Do not make too much of Al Nusra Front, the former Al Qaeda affiliate in the Levant, having publicly split away from Al Qaeda in July. In his statement on camera in July 2016, Al-Nusra Front’s leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani said opposition must “remove the pretext used by powers, including the US and Russia, to bomb Syrians”. This split was a calculation/ scheme to appear more mainstream in an attempt to unify and galvanize other opposition groups in Syria. Al Nusra Front did not want to be singled out as a target for aerial attacks especially given the new possibility U.S.-Russia joint operations against terrorist groups in Syria , and as Al-Nusra attempts to forge alliances with other opposition groups in Syria.
The oft-shifting ties of various extremist groups in the region does not make a significant difference. Al Nusra is still Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda is still Al Nusra. Al Qaeda leadership even gave its blessing to the split, further displaying Al Qaeda’s flexibility. ISIS opposes any group that does not pledge allegiance to it, whereas Al Qaeda displays tactical nuance based on local dynamics. Contrary to ISIS, Al Qaeda espouses “tight knit alliances based on joint fighting, common training and friends on the ground,” as evident in al-Qaeda's relationship with the Taliban in Afghanistan, Al Nusra Front and other extremist groups in Syria, which helps it maintain presence.
Moreover, Al Qaeda experience with local populations and employs more lenient treatment of local Muslims than does ISIS, which repeatedly ignored Al Qaeda central command’s orders to damper displays of brutality in order to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis back when ISIS was still ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’ as an affiliate of the Pakistan-based mother organization.
To conclude, it is no exaggeration to say that the coming period will see al-Qaeda re-emerging as the premier jihadist brand and that several terrorist organizations will withdraw their allegiance and shift them to al-Qaeda. Therefore, states in the region will have no choice but to end armed conflicts and initiate economic and political reform plans so as to curb violent extremism.
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