DID ISIS END IN IRAQ AND SYRIA?

 From roughly 2014 to 2017, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — also known as ISIL or Daesh — held about a third of the territory of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq’s. By December 2017, it had lost 95 percent of its territory, including its two biggest properties, Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and the Northern Syrian city of Raqqa, its nominal capital.

Unlike Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups, ISIS did nothing to hide itself and its activities. Not only did it believe in capturing territory and establishing a caliphate, it presented its exploits to the world through social media messages and video clips. Nor did it hide its recruitment drive. Its tactics were grounded in the theories expounded in the book Management of Savagery by an author who called himself Abu Bakr Naji.

At one point, Naji writes: “The great ‘power’ and that which causes the enemy to reflect one thousand times [is] a result of the ‘powers’ of the groups, whether they are groups of ‘vexation’ or groups of administration in the regions of savagery. The tie of religious loyalty between all of these groups is embodied in a covenant written in blood. The most important clause (of this covenant) is: ‘Blood for blood and destruction for destruction.’ Attaining a great ‘power’ makes the enemy unable to oppose it.”

As should be clear, this passage explains how IS responds to any attack by treating it as an attack against a unified group and body, the unified body being IS itself, whose struggle must continue unceasingly against infidels, both Muslims (those who oppose its exegetical worldview) and non-Muslims. The text remains central to IS operations and continues to inform its exceptional brutality.

While multiple state and non-state actors managed to defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq, after the final battle in Syria — fought in February 2019 at the town of Baghuz Fawqani near Deir ez Zaur, where Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces managed to dislodge ISIS fighters through a series of ground assaults supported by the US-led coalition — hundreds of ISIS fighters managed to flee the Iraq-Syria theatre. Experts believe many went underground and have spread out. Dozens of them are also said to have reached Afghanistan.