40 The New York Review
ISIS After Baghdadi
Jonathan Stevenson
Road Warriors :
Foreign Fighters in
the Armies of Jihad
by Daniel Byman.
Oxford University Press,
382 pp., $27.95
Targeting Top Terrorists :
Understanding Leadership Removal
in Counterterrorism Strategy
by Bryan C. Price.
Columbia University Press,
274 pp., $90.00; $30.00 (paper)
The London Bombings
by Marc Sageman.
University of Pennsylvania Press,
299 pp., $49.95
On October 26 Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi,
the leader of ISIS, died when he deto-
nated a suicide vest after being cor-
nered by US Delta Force soldiers in a
tunnel in Idlib province, along the bor-
der with Turkey in northwestern Syria.
Idlib is the last remaining rebel-held
province, and Baghdadi was apparently
hiding out among many other displaced
Syrians, including jihadists, who were
trying to survive the onslaught from
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s
forces and Russian air power. The CIA
and US Special Forces had located him
with the help of an ISIS informant cul-
tivated by Kurdish intelligence officers
in the US-aligned Syrian Democratic
Forces (SDF). President Trump not
only declared his death an American
victory and a sign of ISIS’s demise
but also claimed, without evidence,
that Baghdadi had “died like a dog”
and “like a coward,” and that he was
“whimpering, screaming, and crying.”
Baghdadi was undeniably inspira-
tional, audacious, and resourceful.
Over the course of six years, begin-
ning in 2013 when he announced its
formation, ISIS under his leadership
had energized transnational Sunni ji-
hadism, supplanting al-Qaeda as its
dominant force, attracting 40,000 for-
eign fighters from 110 countries, and
taking control of large swaths of Syria
and Iraq. He ruled with extreme bru-
tality, mercilessly applying sharia law,
frequently beheading Western captives
and alleged traitors and apostates, and
unabashedly using filmed ISIS violence
and subjugation as a propaganda and
recruiting tool. “Rape and sex played
an important role in Islamic State
selling points,” notes Daniel Byman
in his authoritative and lively book
Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the
Armies of Jihad.
Between August 2014 and March
2019, however, a US-led coalition
steadily rolled back the group’s ter-
ritorial gains. Waged mainly by US
warplanes in support of local ground
forces—crucially Iraqi security forces
and the SDF—Operation Inherent Re-
solve, as the coalition effort was called,
also involved air strikes by the United
Kingdom, France, Belgium, Denmark,
the Netherlands, Canada, Australia,
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emir-
ates, Turkey, and Jordan.
After Baghdadi’s death, ISIS’s gov-
erning council swiftly released an
audio recording announcing that Abu
Ibrahim al-Hashemi Qurayshi would
take his place. It warned the US, “Do
not be happy.” Qurayshi’s name—a
nom de guerre—is meant to convey
that he is directly descended from the
Prophet Muhammad and is thus quali-
fied to become ISIS’s “caliph.” His na-
tionality remains unknown, though the
consensus among terrorism analysts is
that he is an Iraqi. The highest priority
of ISIS’s senior leadership was to signal
to the group’s members and followers
that Qurayshi would provide spiritual,
strategic, and operational guidance
to ISIS’s affiliates and followers just
as Baghdadi had done, and that hewould seek to restore the caliphate that
Baghdadi had proclaimed in Iraq and
Syria in June 2014, brutally expanded
and sustained, and then lost. Their an-
nouncement was also intended to repu-
diate official American statements that
ISIS is moribund.Within ten days, ISIS affiliates in Af-
ghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, Somalia,
and Yemen had pledged allegiance to
the new leader. Yet Baghdadi’s death
does create uncertainty about ISIS’s
short- and medium-term effectiveness.
Qurayshi is unknown and possibly un-
tested. A comparison with al-Qaeda
is useful here. As a result of its high-
profile terrorist operations crowned
by September 11, Osama bin Laden’s
uncanny escape from US forces in Af-
ghanistan across the Tora Bora moun-
tains into Pakistan, and a devastatingly
effective response to the US invasion
and occupation of Iraq, al-Qaeda be-
came an inspiration to aspiring jihad-
ists worldwide. But the US killing of
bin Laden in May 2011, his succes-
sor Ayman al-Zawahiri’s less than
charismatic and unifying leadership,
improved US targeting of al- Qaeda
leaders (especially with drones), and
the group’s subsequent disarray forced
it to retrench and decentralize. This
meant ceding more operational re-
sponsibility to regional affiliates.
The most potent of these had been
al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), led by Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi. After his death in
2006 in a US air strike, AQI and several
other jihadist insurgencies in Iraq then
declared themselves the Islamic State
of Iraq (ISI). This expanded version ofAQI controlled considerable territory
but governed so imperiously and sav-
agely that disaffected Iraqi Sunnis re-
belled against it. Seizing on this “Sunni
Awakening,” US forces partnered with
anti-ISI Sunnis and in 2007 launched
offensive operations against it—the
“surge”—largely rolling back its ter-
ritorial gains and hollowing out its
leadership. Baghdadi became leader of
what remained of the ISI in 2010. Syr-
ia’s civil war, which began in 2011, pre-
sented an opportunity for its revival.
By the time al-Qaeda’s Afghanistan-
and Pakistan-based central leadershipdecided to invest resources and stake a
claim in Syria through Jabhat al-Nusra,
its Syrian affiliate, ISI veterans were al-
ready building up what would become
the Islamic State of Iraq and the Le-
vant (ISIL), infiltrating and fighting for
the Syrian opposition to Assad under
Baghdadi’s leadership and rebranding
the group the Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria (ISIS).
Baghdadi decided that Zawahiri’s
gradual approach—to overthrow Assad
first, then move toward a regional ca-
liphate—was too restrained and re-
jected his attempt to exclude ISIL
from Syria and confine it to Iraq. ISIS
split from al-Qaeda in February 2014;
Baghdadi labeled al-Qaeda apostate
and that June declared a worldwide
caliphate centered in Iraq and Syria,
re naming ISIS simply the Islamic State,
though the group remained known as
ISIS. Al-Qaeda’s reputation suffered,
and the activity of those operating in
its name diminished. ISIS became the
foremost transnational jihadist group,
gaining territory as well as regional
and global influence. Al-Qaeda leaders
had learned from Zarqawi’s experience
a decade earlier, however, when he had
overreached in proclaiming a caliphate
in Iraq, and considered it premature
for ISIS to establish one in Syria and
Iraq. Those reservations proved to be
well founded, as the Obama adminis-
tration’s plan to break ISIS’s control of
the territory it had claimed was con-
tinued and completed by the Trump
administration.Certainly Baghdadi’s death is a
laudable achievement, even if it cameafter the United States and its allies
had already obliterated ISIS’s caliph-
ate. Whether it will be as detrimental
to ISIS as bin Laden’s death was to al-
Qaeda remains to be seen. As ISIS’s
leader, Baghdadi seemed to emulate
bin Laden, remaining in the shadows,
making public pronouncements spar-
ingly, and maintaining an ominous air
of inaccessibility, mystery, and invinci-
bility. He likewise inspired and directed
attacks. But al-Qaeda had considerable
depth within its upper ranks and, de-
spite Zawahiri’s disappointing leader-
ship and the US campaign of targeting
its most important members, was able
to maintain relative continuity.
ISIS seems to have fewer potential
leaders. One possible consequence
could be al-Qaeda’s recruitment of
seasoned ISIS operatives, which would
further weaken the group. But ISIS ap-
pears intent on countering any such
development. In its acknowledgment of
Baghdadi’s death, it also confirmed its
intention to expand into Central Africa
and Europe, threatening new attacks
and characterizing the US as a “laugh-
ingstock” and Trump as “an old and
crazy man... whose opinion changes
between morning and evening.” Thus
Baghdadi’s death has also increased
uncertainty for Washington: US intel-
ligence agencies are unsure how effec-
tively Qurayshi will be able to generate
and sustain organizational cohesion,
international prestige, and operational
momentum.
Decimating the leaders of terrorist
groups—variously called “decapita-
tion,” “high-value targeting,” or the
“kingpin approach”—has been an im-
portant element of Western counter-
terrorism strategy. It is premised on the
idea that a terrorist group’s senior lead-
ers are essential to its operations. The
strategy has worked in the short term,
notably for the United States against
al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Paki-
stan and for Israel against Palestinian
groups. But many analysts doubt its
overall effectiveness. In Ta rge ting Top
Te r rorists, one of the most rigorous
studies to date, the political scientist
and former US Army officer Bryan C.
Price argues that “rather than reducing
the terrorist threat, leadership decapi-
tation is likely to increase the number
of willing recruits for terrorist groups
to exploit, allowing them to grow in
size and popularity.” Decapitation will
be more effective if a leader is crucial
to a terrorist group’s operations, mo-
rale, and recruitment, and if leadership
succession within the group is uncer-
tain. It has become clear that eliminat-
ing a leader—even a singularly historic
one like bin Laden—rarely defeats the
group he leads.
The more independent the opera-
tional components (such as cells) of
a terrorist group are, the less impor-
tant senior leaders are to its viability.
This point too has been hotly debated
among counterterrorism analysts. In
2008 a feud arose between the psy-
chiatrist and former CIA case officer
Marc Sageman and the distinguished
counterterrorism analyst Bruce Hoff-
man. Sageman maintained that jihadist
terrorism was primarily carried out by
groups that, though perhaps inspiredSuspected members of ISIS in a prison run by Kurdish-led forces in Syria, October 2019IvorPrickett/The^ NewYork^Times/Redux