Islamic State retreats but plots post-caliphate terror war

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Sept. 25 (UPI) -- The days of the caliphate, the proto-state pro­claimed by the Islamic State across Syria and Iraq in mid-2014, are numbered. A perplexing cluster of U.S., Russian, Iranian, Turkish and Syrian military forces along with Kurds, jihadists and Tehran-backed Lebanese, Iraqi, Pakistani and Af­ghani Shia militias have been driv­ing IS from its last major urban bastions in Mosul and Raqqa.

Despite these hard-won battle­field victories in Iraq and Syria, the claims of Western politicians and commentators that IS is being crushed are dangerously prema­ture.

If the resilience of earlier versions of jihadist movements is anything to go by, IS and its ruthless ideol­ogy will survive and emerge in an­other form, just as others did in Iraq in 2007-09 in the face of U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus and his "surge" strategy by exploiting the sectarian carnage spawned by the war in Syria, which erupted in 2011.

Three years later, IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the first modern Islamic caliphate.

Remember, too, that Baghdadi, who has reportedly been killed, and his leadership cadre, which in­cludes some of Saddam Hussein's longtime intelligence officers con­sidered to be IS's military brains, spent years underground and have shown themselves to be patient and meticulous strategic planners.

IS is returning to its insurgency and terror roots, with Western Europe and the United States facing intensified attacks. This strategy took shape months ago and is likely to swell as foreign fighters return to their homelands determined to wreak revenge for IS's defeat.

The group's focus for its ter­ror war against the West includes injecting poison into food in su­permarkets and grocery stores, according to SITE intelligence, a US-based monitoring group.

In July, Australian authorities re­ported thwarting a plot to destroy an airliner flying to the United Arab Emirates using poison gas - a new threat to aviation security.

European security officials say IS is building up its forces in chaos-torn Libya to infiltrate op­eratives with the flood of Middle Eastern war refugees pouring into southern Europe from North Af­rica.

"The Islamic State will continue to function as a guerrilla army, de­spite suffering significant losses," warned security analyst Thomas Joscelyn of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democ­racies.

"There is no question that the Islamic State's finances, senior per­sonnel and other assets have been hit hard but it's premature to say its losses amount to a deathblow," he said in testimony before the U.S. Congress on July 13.

Jennifer Cafarella of the Wash­ington-based Institute for Study of War said IS plans to fight on for years. "This is a highly sophis­ticated military organization that's waging a generational war," she said.

Analysts say the failure of the United States and its allies to re­spond to the IS threat beyond the military strategy of pounding it day and night while ignoring the need for long-term plans to ensure stability in war-torn countries such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the com­plex conflicts across the region, will doom the Middle East to years - possibly decades - of savage bloodletting.

"The question that needs to be answered now is who is learn­ing quickest from past mistakes," said Jean-Marie Guéhenno, president of the Brussels-based In­ternational Crisis Group. So far, the terrorists seem to have the edge.

"The Islamic State brilliantly ex­ploited the U.S. occupation [of Iraq] and the aftermath, gaining support from Sunnis alienated by [Shia] domination," Guéhenno wrote in an Aug. 9 analysis.

"The Western-led coalition, for its part, wages this war on terror as if it were a traditional war in which military dominance opens the path to political victory...

"Such a blind war on terror, with no longer-term vision, lays the ground for endless war. In the Mid­dle East, crushing terrorists without a plan for the day after will gener­ate the same vacuum and chaos that produced them in the first place.

"And in Western countries, the elevation of terrorism into a stra­tegic struggle continuously re­fills the pool of foreign fighters for whom terrorist acts are the ultimate selfie," Guéhenno cautioned.

Despite IS's serious reverses and the constant loss of territory and manpower, especially its lead­ership, over the last 18 months, its core group carried out more than 1,400 attacks in 2016 and killed more than 7,000 people, a 20 percent in­crease over the previous year, an August report by the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Data­base stated.

That's not counting more than 950 attacks in 2016 attributed to af­filiated organizations that killed another 3,000 people, the report noted.

During 2016, four major jihadist groups in Yemen, Libya, Bangla­desh, Afghanistan-Pakistan and the Philippines pledged allegiance to IS, underscoring the extent that the core group has expanded its global influence.

The IS wars are increasingly moving into cyberspace, in large part to counter its use of encrypted apps such as Telegram to run its network of operatives across Eu­rope and elsewhere and its virulent recruitment effort using slick prop­aganda videos.

Policy Exchange, a British think tank that monitors jihadist content online, said in a Sept. 19 re­port that al-Qaida also continues to broadcast propaganda, which is most likely linked to the group's re­surgence in recent months, particu­larly in Syria.

One conclusion of the report, "The New Netwar," is that from Feb. 19 through May 3, jihad­ist content was viewed more in the United States than every other country except Turkey, which had 16,810 clicks. The United States had 10,388 followed by Saudi Ara­bia with 10,239, Iraq with 8,138 and Britain with 6,107.

"There is a danger that the blood and treasure we are investing in defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria will produce little more than a pyrrhic victory unless we are able to defeat the visual threat," the 130-page re­port stressed.

Petraeus, the former U.S. military commander in Iraq and CIA direc­tor, said in a foreword that the re­port shows that IS is "exploiting the vast, largely ungoverned spaces of cyberspace, demonstrating in­creasing technical expertise, so­phistication in media production and an agility in the face of various efforts to limit its access.

"It is clear that our counter-ex­tremism efforts and other initiatives to combat extremism online have, until now, been inadequate. There is no doubting the urgency of this matter," he said.

The concerns about the inade­quacy of Western efforts to counter IS's expected terror campaign are widening as IS transitions into a global threat. Its first attack against Iran that killed 18 people in early June was seen as an opening salvo in the emerging post-caliphate phase.

"Formulating an effective con­tainment policy against ISIS will be a herculean enterprise given the complexities of the disintegrat­ing, sectarian-riven Middle East," warned Marc Ginsberg, a former U.S. ambassador to Morocco and senior adviser to U.S. and European coun­ter-extremism initiatives, in the Huffington Post.

"A sustained military engage­ment fronted by Sunni Arab ground forces will have to be matched by comparable diplomatic strategy - all buttressed by a global fortified, well-financed reconstruction plan to prevent the ISIS cancer from re­gaining lost wilayats [provinces] - and that task must begin immedi­ately in Iraq," he said.

However, there is little evidence that the Americans, leaders of the 72-state anti-IS coalition, were contemplating the day-after syn­drome.

With the battle for Raqqa, which began June 6, in its final stages, U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, a former U.S. Marine Corps general, said the United States has aban­doned its strategy of attrition and is employing "annihilation tactics."

"Our intention is that the foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to North Africa, to Eu­rope, to America, to Asia, to Africa," he said. "We're not going to allow them to do so. We're going to stop them there and take apart the cali­phate."

This article originally appeared at The Arab Weekly.