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- A decade after declaring its caliphate, ISIS no longer controls any land, has lost many of its leaders, and is rarely in the news.
- The group continues to recruit members and carry out deadly attacks around the world, including recent operations in Iran and Russia.
- ISIS sleeper cells in Syria and Iraq continue to carry out attacks against government forces and U.S.-backed Syrian fighters.
A decade after the Islamic State militant group declared a caliphate over large swaths of Iraq and Syria, the group no longer controls any territory, has lost many of its prominent leaders and has largely disappeared from global news headlines.
Still, the group continues to recruit members and has claimed responsibility for deadly attacks around the world, including those that killed scores in Iran and Russia earlier this year. As the Iraqi government negotiates with Washington over the possible withdrawal of U.S. troops, sleeper cells in Syria and Iraq continue to carry out attacks against government forces in those countries and U.S.-backed Syrian fighters.
The group, which once attracted tens of thousands of fighters and supporters from around the world to Syria and Iraq and, at its height, controlled an area half the size of Britain, was notorious for its brutality: beheading civilians, massacring 1,700 Iraqi soldiers it briefly captured, and enslaving and raping thousands of Yazidi women, Iraq’s oldest religious minority.
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“Daesh remains a threat to international security,” U.S. Army Maj. Gen. J.B. Voel, commander of Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, said in comments sent to The Associated Press. Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.
Iraqi soldiers celebrate with an Islamic State flag captured during a military operation to retake a village on the outskirts of Mosul, Iraq, on November 29, 2016. A decade after the Islamic State declared a caliphate across large swaths of Iraq and Syria, the militants now control no land, have lost many of their prominent founding leaders and have all but disappeared from global news headlines. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban, File)
“We remain zealous and determined to combat and destroy the remnants of groups that share the ideology of ISIS,” Vowell said.
In recent years, the group’s branches have expanded around the world, particularly in Africa and Afghanistan, but its leadership is believed to be in Syria, where all four of its leaders killed since 2019 were tracked down.
In 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the al-Qaeda splinter group Islamic State of Iraq, distanced himself from the international al-Qaeda network and clashed with its Syrian affiliate, then known as the Nusra Front. The group renamed itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and launched a military campaign that seized much of Syria and Iraq.
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In early June 2014, the group captured Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, in northern Iraq after the Iraqi army collapsed. Later that month, the group opened the border between Syria and Iraqi territory.
On June 29, 2014, Baghdadi appeared at the pulpit of Mosul’s Grand Nouri Mosque wearing a black robe and declared a caliphate, calling on Muslims around the world to pledge allegiance to it and follow him as its leader. Since then, the group has called itself the Islamic State.
“Baghdadi’s preaching is an extension of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s extremist ideology and continues to inspire ISIS members around the world,” said Miles B. Caggins III, a retired U.S. Army officer and senior adjunct fellow at the New Lines Institute and a former spokesman for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. Caggins III was referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida in Iraq leader killed in a U.S. strike in 2006.
From its self-declared caliphate, the group has planned deadly attacks around the world and carried out brutal killings such as the beheading of a Western journalist, burning alive a Jordanian pilot who was locked in a cage days after his fighter jet was shot down, and drowning opponents in swimming pools after locking them in giant metal cages.
A U.S.-led coalition of more than 80 countries was formed to fight IS, and 10 years later, the alliance continues to carry out raids on militant hideouts in Syria and Iraq.
Iraqi soldiers stand guard on a road in a village recently liberated from Islamic State militants on the outskirts of Mosul, Iraq, December 1, 2016. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban, File)
The war against IS formally ended in March 2019 when fighters from the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces captured the eastern Syrian town of Baghouz, the last shred of territory held by the militants.
Before the fall of Baghouz, IS was defeated in Iraq when Iraqi forces captured the northern city of Mosul in July 2017. Three months later, IS was dealt a major blow when the Syrian Democratic Forces captured the group’s de facto capital, the northern Syrian city of Raqqa.
The UN says the group still has between 5,000 and 7,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq.
Still, at least in Iraq, government and military officials insist the group is too weak to fight back.
“It is impossible for (ISIS) to reassert its caliphate. They do not have the command and control capacity to do so,” Iraqi Maj. Gen. Tahseen al-Khafaji told The Associated Press at the Joint Special Operations Command in Baghdad, where Iraqi military officers and U.S.-led coalition officials are directing operations against the militants.
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The command, formed to lead operations against the group a few weeks after the caliphate was declared, remains active today.
Al-Khafaji said IS now consists of cells hiding out in remote caves and the desert as Iraqi security forces prevent the group from escaping. He said Iraqi forces have carried out 35 airstrikes against IS in the first five months of this year, killing 51 of its members.
Also at the headquarters, Sabah al-Noman of the Iraqi Counterterrorism Force said that having lost control in Iraq, extremist groups were seeking to establish bases mainly in Africa, particularly in the Sahel region.
Smoke rises as Iraqi elite counterterrorism forces battle Islamic State fighters to retake the Al-Bakr neighborhood in Mosul, Iraq, on December 12, 2016. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban, File)
“It is impossible to take Iraqi cities, let alone villages,” he said, adding that the U.S.-led coalition was continuing reconnaissance and surveillance to provide intelligence to Iraqi forces and that security forces were “processing this information directly.”
While IS appears to have been defeated in Iraq, it has killed dozens of government and SDF fighters in Syria in the past few months.
“The Islamic State terrorist group continues its terrorist activities,” SDF spokesman Siamand Ali said. “They are present on the ground and are operating at a higher level than in past years.”
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In northeast Syria, SDF fighters are guarding around two dozen detention centers for some 10,000 captured IS fighters, including 2,000 foreigners whose home countries have refused to repatriate them.
The SDF is also monitoring some 33,000 family members of suspected IS fighters, many of them women and children, in the heavily guarded al-Hol refugee camp, a breeding ground for future militants.
In January 2022, the deadliest attack since the defeat of ISIS occurred when militants attacked the Kurdish-run Ghweilan prison (al-Sinaa) in northeastern Syria, which holds thousands of ISIS fighters. The attack sparked 10 days of fighting between SDF and ISIS fighters, leaving around 500 dead on both sides, before the SDF defuses the situation.
Caggins said the US-led coalition’s “military advice and support” to Iraqi security forces, Iraqi Kurdish fighters and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) was “essential to maintain our advantage over ISIS remnants and to protect the more than 10,000 ISIS detainees in makeshift prisons and camps in Syria.”
