ISIS Defeated?

[GMDino]

(02-01-2019, 12:03 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: Isn't the only real measure of how much impact/influence their ideology has determined by how much ground they occupy?  How else will they hold people captive, and force them to submit to said ideology, if they have no territory to have their ideology ruling over?

No.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/podcasts/the-daily/isis-syria-attack-us.html

More:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/world/middleeast/isis-syria-attack-iraq.html

Quote:“People make the mistake of thinking that when you lose territory, it’s linear — that they will continue to lose,” said Seth G. Jones, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of the center’s recent study assessing ISIS’ troop strength.

“When you lose territory, smart groups shift to guerrilla strategy and tactics, including targeted assassinations, ambushes, raids, bombings,” he added. “That is how you wear the enemy down.”


...


Three different reports released late last year — by the Pentagon inspector general, the United Nations and the Center for Strategic and International Studies — estimated that ISIS has 20,000 to 30,000 members in Iraq and Syria alone.
Those figures do not account for the thousands of fighters based in the caves of Afghanistan, in the scrubland of Niger and Mali, in the Sinai Desert, in lawless stretches of Libya and Yemen, and in the numerous other countries where affiliates of the group have taken hold.


Online, the terror group has repeatedly boasted about how the United States’ pullout is evidence that the Islamic State has outlasted the American operation.


In one video narrated by a well-known ISIS propagandist, Turjman Aswarti, the terror group brags that they are stronger now than the last time American forces withdrew.


“When Obama announced America’s flight from Iraq, the fire of our war was only burning in Iraq,” he says, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist content. “Today the flames of war are still burning in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sinai, East Africa and Libya,” he said, naming the other countries where ISIS affiliates have flourished.




“It’s pretty obvious that the group today is vastly more powerful than the Islamic State of Iraq was then,” said Brian Fishman, a former director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy in West Point and the author of book on the rise of ISIS.



Experts say the White House is mistakenly equating the group’s shrunken territorial holdings with its overall strength.





From its peak four years ago, when it held almost half of Syria and a third of Iraq, the Islamic State has now lost all but a fraction of the land it once held in the region.



But it has made a tactical shift to a guerrilla strategy, as Mr. Jones of the strategic and international studies group described it.



ISIS announced this tactical shift as early as 2017, in an article in Naba, its weekly newsletter, said Hassan Hassan, a senior fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Washington.



In the newsletter, the Islamic State compared its situation now with the tatters it was in before the last American pullout.




“It became impossible in early 2008 to continue the fight in its conventional ways,” ISIS said in the essay.




The essay explained that fighting detachments were abolished and the group’s remaining fighters were all trained in using improvised explosive devices.



“Instead of clashing with the heavily equipped American Army, compared to our small and underequipped one, the fight took an absolutely new shape,” the article said.


At the height of its territorial power, ISIS resembled a conventional army, at times rolling into battle with T-55 tanks.
Mr. Hassan has argued the group began the transition back to an insurgency as far back as 2016, a full year before it lost the most important center under its control — the Iraqi city of Mosul.





Mr. Hassan documented how, in early 2016, the group stepped up hit-and-run attacks in towns it had lost. These hasty operations appeared aimed at inflicting harm on these towns’ new rulers, with no intention of regaining territorial control.



Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, documented how throughout Iraq the group has focused with laserlike precision on killing “moktars,” or village chiefs, as well as tribal elders and local politicians.



There were, on average, 15 assassination attempts against local leaders each month in the first 10 months of 2018, by Mr. Knights’ count.


These targeted assassinations drew little coverage in the international news media, and yet they have helped undercut the trust Iraqis place in their government’s ability to protect them — as well as drive young men back into ISIS’s fold, Mr. Knights said.


“If ISIS can come to your town and kill the most important person in your town any night of the year, do you feel you’ve been liberated?” he asked.


The group’s current tactics mirror ISIS’ strategy a decade ago, which led to its rebirth.

“They realized you don’t have to mount 6,000 attacks per month,” Mr. Knights said. “You just have to kill the right 50 people each month.”

But, and this is important, DJT doesn't believe his intelligence reports unless they reinforce what he "knows".