January 16, 2020 41
by al-Qaeda’s vision, formed and oper-
ated primarily on a local basis as infor-
mal “‘bunches of guys,’ trusted friends,
from the bottom up.”^1 He suggested
that self-starter terrorism was more
the rule than the exception. (Although
the term “lone wolf” has metaphorical
appeal, it is often inapt, since many of
the people it is used to describe get at
least some reinforcement from a terror-
ist organization.) In a slashing review,
Hoffman countered that al-Qaeda had
reestablished a safe haven and physical
base in the tribal areas of Pakistan, that
al-Qaeda’s central leadership in Paki-
stan had increased its operational links
with several of its regional franchises,
and that al-Qaeda had regained some
control over affiliated groups.^2 His
point was that even local operators al-
most always needed and got some out-
side practical assistance.
Neither Hoffman nor Sageman was
completely wrong. The attack on the
Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in Janu-
ary 2015, for instance, was perpetrated
by terrorists trained by al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula and possibly facili-
tated by the group. But following the
ascent of ISIS in 2013–2014, jihadist
terrorist operations outside the Middle
East tended to involve locals who were
mostly just stimulated by ISIS rhetoric
and public encouragement. Although
the ISIS leadership in Iraq opportunis-
tically claimed credit for these opera-
tions once their effectiveness became
clear, Internet recruitment, indoctrina-
tion, and training have expanded self-
starter terrorism.
The field of counterterrorism has
thus moved away from static, rigid mod-
els. More recent analyses have sought
to reconcile Sageman’s and Hoffman’s
viewpoints. Assaf Moghadam, for
instance, in Nexus of Global Jihad:
Understanding Cooperation Among
Te r rorist Actors, emphasizes coopera-
tive associations—formal and infor-
mal, face-to-face and virtual—that
an ostensibly self-motivated terrorist
might form, noting “the importance
of network analysis as a fruitful meth-
odology for studying terrorism.” For
purposes of analyzing and countering
terrorism, he concludes, there should
be “no hard separations between types
of cooperation. Instead, they should be
seen as occupying a spectrum ranging
from mergers, at the highest end, to
transactional cooperation, at the low-
est.”^3 The term “lone wolf” does not
appear in his book.
Sageman has continued to focus on
individual actors. In his latest book,
The London Bombings, however, he
argues that the jihadist terrorist threat
is “a hybrid, somewhere between an
organized and a leaderless one.” So-
cietal and political factors are critical
to incubating extremists. They include
close-knit Islamist communities, mar-
ginalization by the host country, bur-
geoning global hostility to Muslims,
and direct contact with indoctrinated
individuals. These do not require the
concerted technical facilitation of a
formal terrorist grouping or support
network to generate “small group dis-
cussions among friends” who may then
“acquire political and eventually radi-
cal ideas” and consolidate into “clus-
ters” that take action.In times of disruption, disarray, or
disillusionment, a transnational terror-
ist group can increase its reliance on
such people to help ensure its vitality.
By late 2015, ISIS was under pressure
from the US-led air campaign in Iraq
and Syria. For well over a year, US
warplanes had pounded its positions
with nearly 10,000 air strikes, killing
about 28,000 fighters. ISIS had lost 40
percent of the territory it held in Iraqand 20 percent of what it held in Syria.
US special operations forces were also
targeting ISIS leaders more success-
fully, killing its second-in-command,
Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, in
March 2016. During this period, ISIS
appeared increasingly inclined to try
to salvage its prestige and its recruiting
power by hitting relatively soft targets
in European cities.
The Paris attacks in November 2015,
which killed 130 people, signaled a new
phase of its campaign. Their purpose
was to partially offset ISIS’s faltering ef-
fort to maintain a caliphate by launch-
ing attacks abroad so as to uphold its
brand and increase its flow of recruits.
According to the University of Mary-
land’s Global Terrorism Database, ISIS
carried out more than 1,400 attacks
and killed more than seven thousand
people in 2016—a 20 percent increase
from 2015. Between the Paris attacks
and ISIS’s decisive defeat in Syria in
2019, there were, in addition to many
ISIS-linked terrorist attacks within the
greater Middle East, locally based at-
tacks in Bangladesh; San Bernardino,
California; Jakarta; Brussels; Orlando,
Florida; Bangladesh again; Nice;
Würzburg, Germany; Charleroi, Bel-
gium; Moscow; St. Cloud, Minnesota;
Berlin; London; Bangladesh a third
time; Chechnya; Paris; eastern Russia;
Manchester; London again; Barcelona;
Surgut, Russia; Brussels again; London
a third time; Marseilles; Nigeria; New
York; Liège, Belgium; and Colombo,
Sri Lanka. Facing major reversals in
Iraq and Syria, the group appeared all
the more determined to stay relevant
and conspicuous by inspiring and fa-
cilitating terrorist attacks outside the
Middle East.Meanwhile, the US-led campaign
against ISIS continued. By Decem-
ber 2017, ISIS had lost 95 percent of
the territory it had controlled in Iraq
and Syria, including two crucial hubs:
Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and
the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, the
caliphate’s designated capital. In 2018
the Kurdish-dominated SDF, aided by
American air strikes and US Special
Forces, led the assault on ISIS’s re-
maining strongholds in eastern Syria.
By December of that year, ISIS held
only a few villages on the Euphrates
River, near the Iraqi border, and by
March 2019 the SDF had mopped those
up, leading to the surrender of thou-
sands of ISIS fighters. Following Rus-
sia’s intervention in the Syrian conflict
in September 2015, the Assad regime,
supported by Iran, Russia, Hezbollah,
and Iran-backed Iraqi Shia militias,
regained military and political control
of most of the other areas of Syria that
ISIS or other Sunni opponents of the re-
gime had controlled.
Idlib, where the US military eventu-
ally tracked Baghdadi down, still hosts
an appreciable number of jihadists.
(An estimated 14,000 to 18,000 ISIS
fighters are still in Iraq and Syria.)
Most of the US military personnel in
Syria were deployed east of Idlib, and,
alongside the SDF, which controlled
northeastern Syria, functioned as a de-
terrent to ISIS’s reconstitution. In early
October Trump ordered a substantial
reduction of US forces in Syria, from
over a thousand to five hundred, re-
deploying them farther south and ac-
quiescing to Turkey’s expulsion of the
SDF from border areas. The US ap-
peared to be abandoning an important
regional ally that had suffered a great
many casualties—some 11,000 Kurd-
ish SDF fighters died in the campaign
against ISIS—for the US-led counter-
terrorism effort.The abrupt shift in policy also left
northeastern Syria chaotic, increasing
jihadists’ freedom of action there and
diluting any positive effect of Bagh-
dadi’s death. Several hundred ISIS pris-
oners escaped from a detention center
when Kurdish forces had to abandon it
to deal with the Turkish invasion. The
custody of another 10,000 remained
compromised, as Turkish forces con-
solidated control over an area seventy-
five miles wide extending nineteen
miles south of the border, now secured
by joint Turkish-Russian patrols under
an agreement between Ankara and
Moscow. In addition, the current po-
litical crisis and consequent instability
in Iraq, as well as growing anger over
Iranian influence there, is likely to in-
crease the appeal of resurgent Sunni
extremism.
In July 2016 al-Qaeda’s Syrian affili-
ate Jabhat al-Nusra was rebranded as
Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, which in turn
merged with several other groups to
form Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in early- Through this group, which at
one point fielded between 10,000 and
14,000 fighters, al-Qaeda has contin-
ued to be a significant force in Syria.
Al-Qaeda and ISIS could reconcile and
form a single organization in Syria, or
reach a modus vivendi under which
they would cooperate and coordinate.
That would be a bad enough outcome.
But the history of such groups suggests
that one will dominate and defeat the
other, and emerge stronger and more
resolute, as in the cases of Hezbollah
and Amal, the Tamil Tigers and their
various rivals, and the Provisional Irish
Republican Army and the Official
IRA. Because of ISIS’s size and momen-
tum—it has appreciably more opera-
tives than al-Qaeda and has surpassed
it in global influence and transnational
operational capability—it would seem
to be the likely victor. Though momen-
tarily bruised, it could emerge stronger
than it is now.
According to the most recent quar-
terly report from the Pentagon, the
State Department, and USAID to Con-
gress on US operations in Syria, the
Defense Intelligence Agency assesses
that Baghdadi’s death will “likely have
little effect on ISIS’s ability to reconsti-
tute,” and that the US pullback from
Syria is affording ISIS “time and space”
to rebuild and target the West.^4 It will
probably continue as a resilient insur-
gency in Iraq and Syria, and as a terror-
ist network extending to Afghanistan,
Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, West
Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, and
even the United States. Assuming that
the group manages to have a reasonably
smooth leadership transition, Trump’s
gratuitous belittling of Baghdadi could
inspire more recruits, inflame jihadist
passions, and increase the likelihood of
anti-American reprisals by ISIS both in
the Middle East and farther afield—in-
cluding in the US.
Even if ISIS remains largely sup-
pressed in Syria and Iraq, it has shown
that it can bide its time and intensify
operations elsewhere. In his last pub-
lic statement before his death—his
first in five years—disseminated in an
eighteen- minute video on April 29,
Baghdadi cast the devastating bomb-
ings in Sri Lanka on April 21, which
killed at least 250 people, as revenge
for the coalition’s seizure of Baghouz,
ISIS’s last outpost in Syria. “Our bat-
tle today is a war of attrition to harm
the enemy, and they should know that
jihad will continue until doomsday,”
he warned, noting that the group had
executed ninety-two attacks in eight
countries even as it lost ground in Syria.
The Trump administration’s partial
withdrawal has been a boon to ISIS,
not least in demonstrating the United
States’ tenuousness as an ally to anti-
ISIS forces. Recent history suggests
a possible pattern: the complete US
withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, which
Iraq insisted on but the Obama admin-
istration tried to curtail, facilitated the
resurgence of the ISI in the form of ISIS
and advanced the spread of extremist
ideology. The Trump administration—
facing backlash from Congress, within
the Pentagon, and from allies—has
recently restored some US troops to
the region and allowed them to help
Kurdish fighters repel ISIS attacks
there. It is unclear whether the admin-
istration is now walking back Trump’s
withdrawal, but it’s obvious that even
though it managed to kill Baghdadi,
the US has no coherent strategy for
Syria. Q
—December 18, 2019Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi(^1) Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Te r -
ror Networks in the Twenty-First Cen-
tury (University of Pennsylvania Press,
2008), p. 69.
(^2) Bruce Hoffman, “The Myth of Grass-
roots Terrorism: Why Osama bin
Laden Still Matters,” Foreign Affairs,
Vol. 87, No. 3 (May/June 2008).
(^3) Columbia University Press, 2017, pp.
55, 265.
(^4) Glenn A. Fine, Lead Inspector Gen-
eral, Operation Inherent Resolve: Lead
Inspector General Report to the United
States Congress, July 1, 2019–October
25, 2019, US Departments of Defense
and State and US Agency for Interna-
tional Development, released Novem-
ber 19, 2019.