In Syria’s Hinterlands, the U.S. Wages a Hidden Campaign Against a Resurgent Islamic State
Defeated by American-led forces half a decade ago, the terrorist group is rebounding amid the chaos of the Middle East
U.S. SPECIAL FORCES BASE, Northeastern Syria—American commandos are scrambling to contain a resurgence of Islamic State where the militant group once imposed its violent religious fervor on vast territories and millions of people.
Islamic State is mustering forces in Syria’s Badiya desert, training young recruits to become suicide bombers, directing attacks on allied troops and preparing to resurrect its dream of ruling an Islamist caliphate, according to officers from the U.S. and the Syrian Democratic Forces, Kurdish-led troops whom the U.S. helped to defeat the militant group five years ago.
Militant fighters have doubled their pace of attacks in Syria and Iraq this year. They have targeted security checkpoints, detonated car bombs and plotted to free thousands of comrades jailed since the SDF and a U.S.-headed Western coalition recaptured the last Islamic State-held town.
In a little-publicized campaign, American aircraft conduct airstrikes and provide live aerial surveillance to SDF ground forces who conduct raids on suspected Islamic State cells. While they usually stay a safe distance from the fighting, elite U.S. troops sometimes conduct missions on their own to kill or capture senior Islamic State leaders.
“This year has been the worst year since we defeated Islamic State,” said Gen. Rohilat Afrin, co-commander of the SDF.
“No matter how much you knock them down, they’ll try to get up again,” she said in an interview at a U.S. commando base in northeastern Syria.
Elsewhere in the world, Islamic State affiliates have carried out high-casualty terrorist attacks, including twin bombings in Kerman, Iran, and a massacre at a Moscow concert venue. But the group’s focus has been on the region it used to control.
Islamic State’s latest comeback effort represents a different challenge than the one it posed in its heyday, when hundreds of militants would charge through isolated villages and crowded cities in tanks and pickup trucks mounted with machine guns. Now the group operates in smaller cells armed with rifles and booby traps.
And today’s response from the U.S., France and their Western allies is complicated by uncertainty—fueled by diplomatic negotiations and the coming American elections—about what role the coalition will play in the region in the months and years ahead.
During the first six months of the year, Islamic State claimed responsibility for 153 attacks in Syria and Iraq. It is building its ranks by surreptitiously indoctrinating youngsters in camps that hold thousands of wives and children of detained Islamic State fighters.
“What we’re seeing is the movement of men, weapons and equipment,” said an American Special Forces officer stationed in Syria.
U.S.-aligned SDF personnel report having captured 233 suspected Islamic State fighters in 28 operations in the first seven months of the year. American aircraft have conducted three strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria, and one in Iraq, so far this year. The U.S., which now has 900 military and civilian defense personnel in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq, carried out four strikes against Islamic State all of last year. American forces have assisted in nearly 50 other airstrikes conducted by the Iraqi air force since the beginning of last year, according to Pentagon data.
SDF ground forces usually hunt down Islamic State cells in villages and towns around northeastern Syria. In one July raid, SDF commandos backed by American Special Forces hit eight compounds housing suspected Islamic State militants.
The operation took six weeks to plan, with U.S. drones and Apache attack helicopters providing aerial surveillance to help commandos spot patterns of people entering and leaving key buildings.
SDF troops built models of the suspect compounds to plan their assault and held full-scale rehearsals. In the early hours of the day of the raid, more than 100 SDF soldiers staggered their movements to arrive simultaneously at their assigned targets spread out over a 10-mile stretch of villages, so that no Islamic State fighters could warn others that the net was closing around them.
The SDF arrested a dozen people without firing a shot, according to the U.S. Special Forces officer. Once the compounds were secured by the Syrian troops, American commandos entered the houses and seized cellphones in the hopes of using their call histories to locate other Islamic State militants.
“We do know this absolutely disrupted planned attacks on coalition and SDF personnel,” the U.S. officer said.
In Iraq, Shiite Muslim leaders have ties to Tehran and are pressing U.S. troops to leave the country, which serves as a logistical base for Pentagon operations in Syria. U.S.-Iraq talks in Washington last month ended without a withdrawal decision but still alarmed American allies in the region.
“We’ll see chaos like we’ve never seen before,” said Brig. Gen. Ali al-Hassan, spokesman for northeast Syria’s U.S.-allied internal-security force. “Any withdrawal will cause the immediate activation of sleeper cells.”
SDF officers recall that in 2018 then-President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of all 2,000 American troops in Syria at the time. Defense officials protested, and Trump was persuaded to leave almost half of them in place.
Decisions about whether the U.S. will remain in the fight are made even more complex by the crazy-quilt conflicts in Syria.
While the U.S. and SDF take on Islamic State in Syria’s breakaway northeastern region, which Kurds call Rojava, NATO member Turkey carries out airstrikes against the SDF, because it sees the independence-minded Kurds as terrorists.
Russian forces help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad battle both the SDF and Islamic State.
Militias armed by Iran, meanwhile, routinely launch explosive drones at U.S. bases in the region. A January attack on a U.S. position in Jordan killed three Americans and wounded dozens. Earlier this month, an Iran-backed militia fired rockets at Iraq’s Al Asad air base, wounding five American servicemembers and two contractors, according to U.S. military officials.
For months this year, Iran-backed attacks forced U.S. troops to reinforce their half-dozen positions in Syria and distracted from the fight against Islamic State.
Islamic State, a Sunni Muslim group, emerged from the al Qaeda branch that fought American forces after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The U.S. withdrew from Iraq in 2011, as the Arab Spring was unleashing political and military instability around the Middle East.
Taking advantage of the moment, Islamic State seized some 38,000 square miles of territory in Syria and Iraq, an area slightly smaller than Virginia, declared it a caliphate and governed as many as 12 million people.
Some 30,000 foreigners from countries including the U.K., France and Tunisia, attracted by the promise of life lived under strict Islamist precepts, flocked to Syria and Iraq to fight on the caliphate’s behalf.
Islamic State authorities minted coins and imposed taxes. They also crucified the bodies of those they executed, the United Nations reported, and sold women from the Yazidi religious minority as slaves outside a military post they had seized from Syrian government forces in the town of al-Shaddadi, according to Gen. Rohilat. Limbs were chopped off, lashings delivered.
“They were very hard on the people,” recalled a business owner in the Syrian village of Tarqia, a few dusty streets of mud-brick compounds, pistachio trees and sunflower patches. Islamic State enforcers would beat anyone who failed to attend mosque, he said.
Of the 250 families originally living in Tarqia, just 100 remain today, he said. The rest journeyed to Turkey or Europe in search of a better life, he said.
In 2014, then-President Barack Obama assembled an international coalition to help Iraqi and Kurdish-led forces reassert control over territories in Iraq and Syria. In 2017, Iraqi government forces and Kurdish fighters recaptured the Iraqi city of Mosul after a fierce battle, and SDF troops retook Raqqa in Syria, once Islamic State’s capital.
In 2019, the Syrian town of Baghouz, Islamic State’s last stronghold, fell to the SDF, and the physical caliphate was no more.
“It was a threat to the entire world, and we defeated it,” recalls Gen. Mahmud Barkhwadan, SDF operational commander in northeast Syria.
Some 9,000 Islamic State fighters remain in jails across northeastern Syria, however, and the group has made no secret of its intention to free its comrades so they can return to the battlefield.
Twice this year, insurgents have tried to stage breakouts from detention facilities. In one case, an Islamic State suicide bomber tried to breach the gate of a Raqqa jail in a three-wheeled auto rickshaw filled with explosives.
“I can’t imagine what would happen if they actually started a prison breakout,” said al-Hassan, the internal-security force spokesman.
There are also some 43,000 Syrian, Iraqi and other displaced people living in camps in northeastern Syria, including many wives and children of jailed Islamic State fighters whom the SDF and U.S. see as potential recruits for the next generation of militants.
At the al-Hol camp, children draw in coloring books with images of hand grenades, AK-47 rifles and explosive suicide vests. U.S. soldiers have obtained photos of Islamic State-themed children’s birthday parties, the militants’ black-and-white flag hung on the wall amid the balloons.
“They’re trying to brainwash them as kids, so when they grow up they’ll be willing to kill without hesitation,” Gen. Rohilat said.
Security officials say that as boys reach fighting age, Islamic State smuggles them out of the camp for military training in the desert.
Local authorities have had a difficult time figuring out what to do with the families, who are often not wanted in their home countries but are deemed too dangerous to be released among the general public.
“Attention has shifted elsewhere,” the U.S. Special Forces officer said. “But now is not the time to take our eyes off of northeast Syria.”
Write to Michael M. Phillips at Michael.Phillips@wsj.com