ISIS and the U.S. Counterterrorism Wars Abroad

Abroad, the United States continues to face resilient jihadist insurgencies. Across the Greater Middle East and South Asia, Al Qaeda, ISIS, and their various affiliates continue to exist 19 years after the 9/11 attacks. However, ISIS continues to struggle following the elimination of its territory in Iraq and Syria and holds far less power than it did at its peak. Despite ISIS’s struggles, the United States should not expect to be able to deal the group a lasting defeat that eliminates it as a potential threat. Even so, the United States continues to wage counterterrorism wars across the region, some of which are escalating while others are proceeding at a slower pace.

On March 23, 2019, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) announced the elimination of ISIS’s last bit of territory in Syria.¹ In almost a year and a half since that date, ISIS has failed to mount a territorial resurgence. In addition, on October 26, 2019, the United States killed ISIS’s leader and self-proclaimed caliph in a raid in Syria.²

Other signs of ISIS’s weakness includes continued evidence that the foreign fighter flow to Syria and Iraq, particularly from the West has fallen to almost zero. For example, Europol’s report on terrorism in 2019, notes, “In 2019 there were few attempts reported by EU foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) to travel to conflict zones reported to Europol, with only Austria and Spain confirming one prevented case each. This follows the pattern of the decreasing numbers of jihadists travelling from Europe since 2016.”³ In 2019, Europol estimated that about 5,000 Europeans had traveled to Syria and Iraq over the course of the conflict and put the number still in the region at 2,000.⁴ Europol has assessed that the flow of fighters has dried up for the past few years. For example, in 2019, it reported, “the number of EU [foreign fighters] travelling to the Iraq and Syria conflict zone in 2018 was very low” and similar language can be found in its 2018 and 2017 reports.⁵

Similarly, according to New America’s tracking, in 2020 there were only two cases of individuals trying to travel abroad to join ISIS, and both were monitored closely by informants. Already in May 2017, then-National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen stated, “The good news is that we know that the rate of foreign fighters traveling has steadily declined since its peak in 2014.”⁶ Over the course of the conflict, about 300 Americans traveled or attempted to travel to fight in Syria.⁷

Nor has ISIS carried out any major attacks outside of Iraq and Syria or the areas where its affiliates remain in conflict so far this year. However, the deadly bombings in Sri Lanka over Easter 2019 that killed hundreds illustrate the group’s potential to at least inspire and link itself to major attacks abroad and the threat of another such attack should not be dismissed.⁸

However, ISIS remains resilient as a terrorist organization in Iraq and Syria. The group continues to carry out attacks at a pace below its peak in 2014, but not substantially below prior years.⁹ Emphasizing the group’s resilience, CENTCOM’s Commander General Kenneth McKenzie commented, “There's never going to be a time… when either ISIS or whatever follows ISIS is going to be completely absent from the global stage. So the future, even the brightest possible future, is not a bloodless future, but it can be a future which we would define as where local security forces are able to contain ISIS without significant external help.”¹⁰ General McKenzie commented in August 2020 that there are plans to further shrink the U.S. military presence in Iraq and Syria, though details are sparse and it is likely the United States will maintain a presence in both countries for the foreseeable future.¹¹ This should not be a surprise as the United States proved unable to defeat ISIS in its earlier forms, even with more than 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.¹² The killing of Baghdadi, like so many supposed decapitation strikes before in the counterterrorism wars in Iraq and elsewhere, is unlikely to bring the group to an end.¹³ Indeed, a January 2020 Department of Defense Inspector General report stated that ISIS remained cohesive and capable after the loss of Baghdadi.¹⁴

ISIS’s resilience reflects the broader difficulty of achieving lasting defeat of terrorist groups. Counterterrorism policymakers warn of the overall difficulty and near impossibility of defeat as an objective when it comes to terrorists, even when efforts are heavily resourced.¹⁵ Furthermore, the decentralization of terrorist groups and their adoption of branding techniques makes it even more difficult to deal groups a lasting defeat. This makes it essential for policymakers to state exactly which objectives they seek, instead of using the rhetoric of defeat when they wage counterterrorism warfare; but unfortunately, across the political spectrum, references to defeat are far more common than specific, measured objectives.

America, for its part, continues to wage counterterrorism wars across the Greater Middle East. In Somalia, the United States continues to conduct strikes at a rapid pace. In Yemen, the United States has conducted a lower level of strikes, though the existence of covert strikes makes it difficult to assess the full extent of the counterterrorism war, and in Pakistan the drone war has marked its second year without a single strike, suggesting it may be over. In 2020, in Libya, the United States conducted no air strikes, according to New America’s tracking. In 2019 in Libya, New America, in collaboration with Airwars, counted seven U.S. air or drone strikes, and in an email to New America, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) stated that the United States had conducted 10 airstrikes against ISIS-Libya and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb terrorist targets (six total airstrikes in Libya in 2018, and four in 2019).¹⁶ The United States also continues to carry out direct military operations in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan with training, and advise and assist efforts in many other countries.

In Somalia, the United States is still conducting strikes targeting al-Shabaab and ISIS in Somalia at a high pace. As of September 4, the United States had conducted 47 strikes in Somalia in 2020, with more than four months left in the year.¹⁷ In 2019, the United States conducted 64 operations, 61 of which were air or drone strikes. Every year since 2016 has seen more strikes than any in any previous single year of the campaign, according to New America’s tracking, and 2020 could well continue that trend.

In the last year, the United States has been accused of civilian casualties by human rights groups and international non-governmental organizations. According to Amnesty International, for example, on February 2, 2020, the United States, with the Federal Government of Somalia, conducted an airstrike targeting an al-Shabaab terrorist in the vicinity of Jilib, that killed at least one civilian.¹⁸ On July 28, 2020, AFRICOM released a statement that after further investigation of this strike, one civilian was killed, and three other civilians were injured.¹⁹

In Yemen, the United States has conducted strikes at a much lower pace in 2020. According to New America’s tracking, the United States has conducted only four strikes in Yemen during 2020 as of September 4.²⁰ Of these strikes, one targeted not AQAP or other jihadist groups but Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) figures in Yemen as part of the retaliation for an Iranian-backed militia’s deadly attack on American forces in Iraq that also involved the assassination of the IRGC Quds Force Commander Qasim Soleimani in Iraq.²¹

Importantly, it is particularly difficult to track the true extent of the U.S. war in Yemen because the United States appears to be conducting covert strikes in Yemen, and the Yemeni civil war has made it more difficult for the media to fully investigate reports of strikes and to attribute them when they occur.²² In 2020, of the four strikes that New America has recorded in the country, CENTCOM says it did not conduct any of them.²³ However, government officials have been cited as saying at least some of the four strikes occurred, and the Department of Justice confirmed the existence of at least one strike, though it did not provide details, in its statement on the attack in Pensacola, Florida.²⁴ This discrepancy strongly suggests the existence of continued covert strikes in Yemen.

In Pakistan, according to New America’s tracking, the United States has not conducted a drone strike in more than two years with the last one being a strike in July 2018.²⁵ This prolonged halt was preceded by another almost five-month pause in strikes in the country.²⁶ Multiple factors may have fueled this halt, including a decline in the threat posed by jihadist groups in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Area, the reduction of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and the role of domestic Pakistani politics.²⁷ The long pause suggests that the U.S. war in Pakistan may be over, but given its covert nature, it is hard to be certain whether strikes have actually fully stopped, and whether the halt is an end or a temporary pause. This is one of the problems with America’s approach of waging covert counterterrorism wars without public statements of the objectives being sought and a vision of when those objectives would be achieved sufficiently to not require further military force.