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| A U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter takes off while transporting American troops out of a remote combat outpost known as RLZ on May 25, 2021, near the Turkish border in northeastern Syria. (John Moore/Getty Images) |
| In his first term, President Donald Trump declared victory over the Islamic State. It was December 2018 and Trump announced that the U.S.-led coalition against the extremist Islamist group had completed the job of dislodging the terrorist faction from its major redoubts in Syria and earlier in Iraq. The campaign to extinguish the ISIS “caliphate” — its mini-state that include major cities like Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq — had been intense, involving waves of heavy bombing and the combined efforts of U.S. and Western airpower and allied local militia on the ground. “We have won against ISIS,” Trump said in a video at the time, adding that U.S. forces deployed to Syria are “coming back now.”
Even then, officials in the Trump administration were more sanguine than their boss, telling reporters that ISIS’s territorial losses didn’t mean the group was extinguished and that an enduring mission was needed to keep its militants in check. More than six years later, a detachment of U.S. troops still operates in Syria as part of that continued mission, and may remain as Trump starts his second term later this month. A low-level counterinsurgency carries on — just this past week, separate U.S. and French missile strikes targeted ISIS positions in Syria. The U.S. presence is in the spotlight given the political upheavals in Syria. Rebels now rule in Damascus and the country’s political transition has seen an ascendant Islamist faction come to fore, though it has nothing to do with the extremists of ISIS. Meanwhile, Turkish proxies are eyeing areas of northeast Syria held by U.S.-linked Kurdish groups, which, among other things, patrol the major open-air prison camps housing unwanted ISIS detainees for the past decade.
Far from Syria, ISIS still casts a shadow. The man suspected of being behind the deadly rampage in New Orleans in the early hours Wednesday had an ISIS flag in the pickup truck he used to ram into a crowd of New Year’s revelers. FBI officials expressed doubt Thursday that the attack involved anyone else beyond the truck driver, but were clear about its ideological inspiration. “He was 100 percent inspired by ISIS,” FBI Deputy Assistant Director Christopher Raia told reporters at a news conference. “We’re digging through more social media, more interviews … to ascertain more about that.” Whatever the outfit’s operational capacity, its standing in extremist circles has influenced a wave of radicalized “lone wolf” attackers on both sides of the Atlantic. “The New Orleans terrorist attack simply confirms what many in the counterterrorism community have been saying for the past year, which is that ISIS remains a stubborn and persistent threat and one which simply isn’t going to fade away,” Colin Clarke of the Soufan Group, a consultancy that focuses on global security issues, told NBC News. In just this past year, an array of ISIS-linked or inspired attacks have struck major cities around the world, including devastating bombings in the Iranian city of Kerman and a shocking killing spree in April carried out by four gunmen in a Moscow concert venue. The organization’s most concrete branch is ISIS-K, or Khorasan, which operates out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and is a font of the group’s online propaganda efforts. But ISIS has also made inroads in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. “The ISIS threat in Africa, in our view, is potentially one of the greatest long-term threats to U.S. interests,” Brett Holmgren, the head of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, told Politico last November. “They’ve clearly prioritized Africa as a growth opportunity.” “The single biggest concern I have is the resurgence of ISIS,” outgoing White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN this past weekend when asked for his evaluation of the situation in Syria. He added that ISIS was doing “everything it can … to regrow its capabilities” in the security vacuum left behind by the fall of the dictatorial regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Sullivan’s imminent successor, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Florida), is a mainstream Republican hawk who hinted that Trump may not follow through on his long-standing vows to pull out U.S. troops in Syria. “The president has been crystal clear on and his mandate from the voters was to do everything he can to avoid us getting [dragged] into more Middle East wars,” Waltz told Fox News in a recent interview. “But in Syria, he is clear-eyed about the threat of ISIS that’s still there. … We have to keep a lid on it.” Some analysts are skeptical that Trump will persevere. The number of ISIS fighters in the field in Syria are estimated to be fewer than 3,000 and they will possibly be kept in check by a constellation of other actors, from the new Syrian regime to Syrian Kurds to the Turkish military and its allies. "Trump is going to ask, ‘Why do I have to keep … troops on to fight ISIS, when essentially all of our fighting is mainly bombing them in the desert?’” James Jeffrey, Trump’s Syria envoy in his first term, told my colleagues. “And it’s going to be very hard to answer that question.” | ||||||||
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| People walk through the Sahel al Banat camp for internally displaced people in Raqqa governorate in Syria on Feb. 5, 2022. (Nicole Tung for The Washington Post) |
| The biggest vulnerability lies in the maintenance of ISIS prison camps in northeastern Syria. Nearly 10,000 fighters and more than triple that number of relatives and children are kept in these squalid detention centers, which U.S. officials have warned are becoming breeding grounds for a new generation of radicalized militants. The camps are run by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a largely Kurdish faction that partnered with the United States to drive ISIS out of its major strongholds less than a decade ago. The SDF’s depleted numbers, potential loss of direct U.S. support and looming battles with Turkish proxies could lead to a worrying prison break. Farhad Shamsi, a spokesman for the SDF, told my colleagues that he hoped the incoming Trump administration would preserve the current U.S. footprint in the region, which involves some 2,000 soldiers. “We hope that they will maintain their presence here in Syria, especially in this critical situation, because we think that ISIS will be resurging,” Shamsi said. |