The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect Middle East tracker’s editorial stance. First published Foreign Policy, April 10, 2024
The Islamic State Never Went Away
Terrorism is a tactic, and fighting it requires a concerted strategy.
© Copyright Colin P. Clarke, 2024
With the recent Moscow concert venue attack that killed more than 140 people, the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) surprised many who may have believed that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, was a problem of the past.
In fact, the Islamic State never went anywhere. According to the Global Terrorism Index, an annual publication from the Institute for Economics & Peace that attempts to measure the impact of terrorism worldwide, the Islamic State “remained the deadliest terrorist group globally for the ninth consecutive year, recording both the highest number of attacks and deaths from terrorism.” Islamic State attacks earlier this year, in Iran and Turkey, underscore this dynamic.
At its peak, the Islamic State controlled territory in the Middle East that was equal to approximately half the size of Great Britain. It attracted tens of thousands of foreign fighters from dozens of countries worldwide. Its fighters beheaded Westerners, burned a captured Jordanian pilot alive, and sought nefarious means of murdering its captives, including drowning and crucifixion. These crimes against humanity were recorded and ISIS broadcast these snuff films as propaganda to terrify civilians and recruit bloodthirsty extremists into its ranks. The group even held slave auctions where Yazidi women were purchased.
Over the span of a few years, ISIS either directed or inspired numerous high-profile attacks throughout Europe, including the Bataclan in Paris (2015), the Brussels Metro attack (2016), Nice (2016), Berlin (2016), Stockholm (2017), Istanbul (2017), and Barcelona (2017), to name just a few. There were also attacks throughout the globe, from New York City to Tunis.
At the time, it seemed that the Islamic State was ubiquitous, but an aggressive U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign referred to as the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS helped usurp the organization’s control of large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria—particularly the group’s strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa, respectively. Efforts included a sustained airpower campaign to bomb ISIS command-and-control nodes, as well as intensive ground operations featuring a combination of U.S. special operations forces, Kurdish militias, and even Iraqi Shiite militia groups known as Hashd al-Shaabi. In late March 2019, just over five years ago, the Syrian town of Baghouz fell to the Syrian Democratic Forces, bringing an end to the group’s territorial caliphate. To this day, the United States has approximately 900 troops in Syria and another 2,500 in Iraq, forming a bulwark against an ISIS comeback in these countries. And when Baghouz fell, there was widespread optimism that the scourge of the Islamic State could be defeated once and for all.
But the Islamic State was well prepared for this inevitability. Even the group’s former longtime leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, anticipated the revocation of the territory tied to the caliphate and implored ISIS sympathizers that “the scale of victory or defeat … is not tied to a city or village.” “The land of God is wide,” he continued, “and the tides of war change.”
Part of the Islamic State’s strategy was to expand globally, developing a worldwide network of franchise groups, affiliates, and branches that could carry out its mission in different regions. Over several years beginning in 2014, ISIS formally recognized wilayats, or provinces, in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Afghanistan (Khorasan), Libya, Bangladesh, the Philippines, West Africa, the Sahel, and Central Africa (Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
This campaign succeeded. After its rise and fall in the heart of the Middle East, the Islamic State’s center of gravity has shifted to parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In 2023, among the top 10 countries impacted by terrorism were: Burkina Faso (1), Mali (3), Pakistan (4), Afghanistan (6), Somalia (7), Nigeria (8), and Niger (10). In sub-Saharan Africa, the Islamic State Sahel Province (formerly known as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, or ISGS) and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) control large swaths of territory that stretch from the outskirts of coastal West Africa all the way to the Lake Chad Basin.
Now that the Islamic State is perceived as more of an African and South Asian problem, countering the group has dropped significantly on the international community’s agenda. In the West, particularly in the United States, the national security establishment is focused instead on the rise of China, the war in Ukraine, fallout from the Israel-Hamas war, and the proliferation of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence.
When global terrorism appears to fade, it is typically in response to counterterrorism pressure. But terrorism is a tactic. It never actually goes away, and it endures because it is versatile—an asymmetric tool of non-state actors, or the preferred response of states sponsoring proxy groups.
Colin P. Clarke, the director of research at The Soufan Group and a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center.