President Trump has boasted about the defeat of the ISIS caliphate, a swath of territory in Syria and Iraq formerly controlled by the Islamist fundamentalist army. But ISIS hasn’t disappeared, just retreated to fight a terror war — of which the Sri Lanka attacks may have been one of the opening battles
When the little known Islamist group National Thowfeek Jamaath launched a series of suicide-bombing attacks targeting churches and hotels on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka, triggering one of the deadliest terror attacks since 9/11, many counter-terrorism experts suspected the guidance of an unseen hand. The level of coordination and bomb-making sophistication seemed out of reach for a local group with little experience in terrorism.
“After months dominated by the narrative that ISIS has been defeated, Baghdadi is rallying the troops and trying to compensate for its loss of its caliphate by emphasizing that the group is still expanding,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The liberation of the caliphate, which once stretched from Syria’s Mediterranean coast nearly to the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, is indeed a watershed moment. Baghdadi’s claim to rule over all Muslims as the “caliph” — announced in a fiery speech at the Al Nuri Grand Mosque in Mosul in 2014 — resonated deeply in the global Islamist movement.
U.S. counterterrorism and military officials have always been deeply skeptical of repeated claims by President Trump and messaging from the White House that ISIS has been defeated. When Trump announced on Twitter last December that “We have defeated ISIS in Syria,” and he was thus withdrawing all 2,000 U.S. troops from the country, it so shocked Pentagon officials that former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned in protest. Pushback from the U.S.
The conditions of instability, sectarian conflict, and religious extremism that gave rise to Al Qaeda and ISIS are even more prevalent today. A recent report by the Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, for instance, concluded that the number of Salafi-jihadist fighters has more than tripled since September 11, 2001, and there are tens of thousands of radicalized individuals just in Europe.
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