To Defeat ISIS, Focus on Its Real Sources of Strength

Benjamin Bahney, Patrick B. Johnston

Security, Middle East

Metastasizing abroad may help ISIS revitalize its campaign for recruits and money in Iraq and Syria.

In the past several weeks, ISIS poured out its violence on three of the group’s main enemies across the globe. First, Russian authorities concluded that a terrorist attack brought down a civilian airliner in late October, likely an ISIS response to the country’s recent major intervention in Syria. Then ISIS claimed responsibility for a major attack against a Hezbollah-controlled area in Lebanon, demonstrating strategic depth and capability against its regional rivals. One day later, it conducted a series of horrific coordinated attacks in Paris.

But ISIS’s recent turn to international terrorism comes against a broader backdrop of stagnation and military losses in Iraq and Syria. In the past six months, the anti-ISIS coalition, the Iraqi government, and U.S.-backed Kurdish forces have enjoyed some significant successes against the group. Recent ground operations have expanded Kurdish control in northern Syria and in western Iraq. Furthermore, over a third of the group’s leadership has been eliminated over the past year. ISIS’s leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was injured in an airstrike and was reportedly incapacitated. His heir apparent was killed in a separate airstrike. Earlier this month, so-called “Jihadi John,” ISIS’s British executioner, and ISIS’s leader in Libya were both killed in U.S. airstrikes.

Despite these successes, the swath of territory ISIS controls in its self-proclaimed caliphate is more than sufficient to provide a sanctuary for terrorist attacks in the region and overseas. Moreover, ISIS’s succession scheme and extensive bureaucracies limit the impact of the coalition killing or capturing its senior leaders.