2/16/20
The Islamic State has lost all of its territory; tens of thousands of its fighters have been killed or are imprisoned; and its former leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is dead. But a Kurdish leader who witnessed the militant group’s rise and fall is warning that ISIS is putting itself back together and stressing an uncomfortable fact: that ISIS is bigger now than it was nearly six years ago, when it founded its self-styled caliphate. Eager to move on, President Donald Trump has declared victory over ISIS. Nevertheless, the conflict is ongoing, and to the extent that the Democratic presidential candidates mention the fight, it’s to express their desire to withdraw troops. The reality, though, suggests that a definitive end to the conflict remains out of reach. Even after America spent billions of dollars during two presidencies to defeat ISIS, deployed troops across Iraq and Syria, and dropped thousands of bombs, ISIS persists. If anything, it stands ready to exploit Trump’s impatience to end America’s “forever wars” and shift the country’s focus to countering Iran. “ISIS is still very much intact,” Masrour Barzani, the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, told us in an interview. “Yes, they have lost much of their leadership. They have lost many of their capable men. But they’ve also managed to gain more experience and to recruit more people around them. So they should not be taken lightly.” Barzani has watched with concern as Trump zigzagged on the presence of American troops who were supporting Syrian Kurds in their own anti-ISIS fight, then ramped up a confrontation with Iran that has thrown the U.S. mission in Iraq into uncertainty.
U.S. military officials and Western and regional politicians have never stopped warning about the Islamic State’s ability to recruit fighters and launch attacks. When Trump ordered a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria in October, he faced bipartisan resistance from lawmakers who said the job was not yet done. But what is striking about Barzani’s portrayal of the group is the idea that it is not just surviving but thriving. It jibes, however, with recent warnings: from the Pentagon’s inspector general, who said in a report last week that Baghdadi’s death has not disrupted ISIS’s command structure or operations; and from the United Nations, which said in a report last month that ISIS still has at least $100 million in its reserves and has begun to reassert itself in Iraq and Syria. Many residents remain in displaced-persons camps. “If people are jobless, if people are hopeless, if people have no security, if people have no opportunity, if there is no political stability, it’s always easy for terrorist organizations to manipulate local populations,” Barzani told us. “ISIS is a by-product. So as long as these factors are still valid, there will always be either ISIS or something similar to ISIS.”
