Afghanistan, the fortress in the mountains They kidnap civilians and kill soldiers not just in Nigeria, but in the neighboring countries of Chad, Niger and Burkina Faso, defying multi-national military efforts to suppress their activity. ![]() In 2015, the members of the Boko Haram Islamist terrorist group, notorious for kidnapping local schoolgirls, swore allegiance to the Islamic State.Īs many as 4,000 of its fighters operate in the northeastern jungles of Nigeria, attacking army outposts, remote villages and even towns. Delta Force operation led to the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s messianic leader – but the group has already chosen a successor and has vowed to avenge al-Baghdadi’s death. Nevertheless, roughly 70,000 Islamic State members and supporters – men, women and children – still remain in their Kurdish-guarded internment camps, which have, however, become training centers for a new generation of jihadist “Cubs of the Calihphate.”Ī November 2019 U.S. troops would retreat from their bases in northern Syria, many Islamic State fighters taken prisoner by the Kurds have also broken out of their prisons. Since President Donald Trump’s October 2019 announcement that U.S. Since the defeat of their physical state, resilient IS insurgents in Syria have killed pro-government Russian soldiers, massacred pro-government Druze tribesmen, and attacked anti-ISIS Kurdish fighters and intelligence officers with car bombs and roadside bombs. As they retreated, IS leaders hid weapons caches and millions of dollars in the vast Syrian desert, and reconstituted their movement as a guerrilla fighting force. That organization slowly collapsed under assaults by U.S.-backed Kurdish forces and the Syrian Arab Army, backed by Russia and Iran. Syria, the former terror capitalįrom 2015 to 2019, the Islamic State ran a government in the Syrian territory it occupied, based in the Raqqa province of northeastern Syria. troops to leave Iraq, which would provide opportunity for IS forces to expand their operations. Iraq’s parliament and prime minister have called for all U.S. Soleimani’s death, which Islamic State leaders hailed as “ divine intervention,” led to a halt in joint U.S.-Iraqi operations against the Islamic State. Qassem Soleimani, who had led Iraqi Shiite militias against them. Most recently, IS fighters have been heartened by the U.S. In the summer of 2019, IS fighters in northern Iraq also burned hundreds of acres of crops belonging to suspected pro-government villagers whom they labeled “infidels.” The group’s terror campaigns include dressing up as government troops at fake checkpoints and executing “traitors,” killing pro-government tribal and village elders and executing government employees in night raids on their homes. They also attract new Sunni recruits, resentful of discrimination and repression from the currently Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. and Iraqi troops, Kurdish forces and local Shiite militias. Since major defeats in 2017, the Islamic State group has retreated to a largely inaccessible sanctuary in the remote Qara Chok, Hamrin and Makhmoul mountains of northeastern Iraq. It also maintained a ferocious fighting force, always seeking to expand the reach of its so-called “ caliphate” fundamentalist Islamic regime. In 2014 IS blitzed across the region and took over a wide swath of Iraq and Syria, where it functioned as a de facto government. Up until then, Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baathist party had suppressed Islamist jihadi groups of all stripes, limiting influence in Iraq from Shiite-dominated Iran and Sunni-fundamentalist Saudi Arabia. The “Dawla Islamia,” or Islamic State, began as a Sunni Muslim insurgent group in Iraq amid the maelstrom of sectarian violence that followed the U.S.-led 2003 invasion. In recent months, the Islamic State group has reconstituted itself in the Syria-Iraq region and continues to inspire mayhem across the globe. I also monitor Islamic State activities around the world for a University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth project I lead called It’s part of my research chronicling America’s wars in remote lands where I have worked for the CIA and the U.S. I keep track of the loose alliance of various global affiliates and insurgent groups collectively known as the Islamic State. Thousands more IS-aligned fighters are spread across Africa and Asia, from the scrublands of Mali and Niger to the deserts of Iraq and mountains of Afghanistan, to the island jungles of the Philippines. In a series of bloody campaigns from 2014 to 2019, a multinational military coalition drove the Islamic State group, often known as ISIS, out of much of the Iraqi and Syrian territory that the strict militant theocracy had brutally governed.īut the Pentagon and the United Nations both estimate that the group still has as many as 30,000 active insurgents in the region.
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