WASHINGTON – The Biden administration celebrated its killing of the leader of ISIS this week, but there are signs the terror network is regrouping, expanding far outside of its Middle East stronghold – and potentially poised to strike American targets anywhere in the world.
"Thanks to the bravery of our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more," President Joe Biden said Thursday in announcing the U.S. military raid against Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi in northwest Syria.
But while al-Qurayshi might be gone, the Islamic State terror network he oversaw is flourishing, has a continuity of operations plan and poses a significant threat to U.S. interests, according to USA TODAY interviews with more than a dozen current and former U.S. intelligence officials and counter-terrorism experts.
ISIS leader dies: ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi dies in US military raid in Syria
As a leader, al-Qurayshi was far different than his predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who embraced public displays of brutality between 2014 and 2019 that included rapes, whippings, systematic executions, massacres and deadly terrorist plots.
ISIS once boasted of as many as 30,000 fighters and a functioning government, or caliphate, in Iraq and Syria with its own taxation and education system. Adherents came from around the world to train in its camps and return home – including to Europe – to wage jihad or Islamic holy war.
In March, 2016, 32 people were killed and hundreds wounded in ISIS-linked suicide bomb attacks in Brussels, Belgium. That July, 86 people were killed in Nice, France, after a large truck barreled into a crowd of revelers watching Bastille Day fireworks. ISIS claimed responsibility for both attacks.
In contrast, al-Qurayshi’s words and actions were aimed at avoiding headlines and attracting attention to ISIS after al-Baghdadi was killed in a similar U.S. raid in the same part of Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province in October 2019.
Taking ISIS underground
Al-Qurayshi kept such a low profile during his two-plus years as the group’s leader, in fact, that he never appeared in public or in Islamic State propaganda videos, the current and former officials said. And virtually no public photos of him exist from this time, they said.
But al-Qurayshi – a veteran ISIS insider and top ideologue – was just as ruthless as Baghdadi, if not more so. As Biden noted, he played a leading role in one of ISIS’s most brutal atrocities – the enslavement of thousands of women from Iraq’s Yazidi community and other religious minorities.
Al-Qurayshi also was a driving force in ISIS’s external operations, or attacks internationally, since the early days, according to Douglas London, a 34-year veteran CIA counterterrorism officer who retired in 2019.
“He believed that was going to attract – and it did attract – recruits and the people he wanted into the organization,” said London, author of the 2021 book, “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence.”
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And al-Qurayshi was a military strategist who took ISIS underground after Baghdadi’s death and the punishing U.S. military campaign that led to it. That enabled the organization to retool itself as an under-the-radar insurgency that could regroup and rebuild without the once-vast territory it had held in the Middle East, according to current and former U.S. officials, including London.
And that is what is really causing alarm among veteran ISIS watchers, who say the group has rebounded in significant ways while the world’s attention has been focused elsewhere.
Marshaling its forces
Under al-Qurayshi’s leadership, ISIS had been quietly marshaling its forces in Syria and Iraq, raising money and enlisting recruits. It has also branched out, cultivating new strongholds on several continents, said Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Zelin said that compared to al-Qaida, ISIS isn't an organization that built itself around a charismatic leader, especially after the death of Baghdadi. Instead, its strength has come more from the power of its ideas, including building a caliphate and developing its territorial control in many locations.
“So while it's a huge coup that the U.S. did kill him, on a day-to-day basis the operation of ISIS probably won't change that much,” said Zelin, author of the forthcoming book, "Your Sons Are At Your Service," about young jihadists. “They still have a large presence in other areas of the world beyond just Iraq and Syria, and the IS (Islamic State) machine will continue with whoever its new leader is.”
“They're not in the news on a day to day basis,” Zelin added. “But they've been building up their capacities” outside of Iraq and Syria for years.
Last summer, when the Taliban took over Afghanistan, ISIS’s affiliate there mounted an assault on the U.S.-led evacuation effort, including a suicide bombing at the airport that killed 13 U.S. troops and at least 170 others. The group is also building up a presence – and launching attacks – in Bangladesh, Kashmir and elsewhere in South Asia, Zelin said.
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And ISIS has also grown its operations in places like Nigeria, Mali, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to Zelin and others.
“It's not about building one caliphate," Zelin said. "It's more of a multi-generational fight, and they’re hoping to someday connect all of the territories that they’re currently operating in.”
Although thousands of ISIS fighters remain in custody in Syrian prisons overseen by the U.S.-allied Syrian Democratic Forces, many of them have paid $2,000 or more to smuggle in cellphones that they have been using to fundraise, communicate and plot future operations, said Jomana Qaddour, a resident senior fellow with the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council.
And there are many thousands more ISIS members and their families in camps in Syria that have become hotbeds of recruitment and radicalization, said Qaddour, who is also a member of the Syrian Constitutional Committee, aUnited Nations-facilitated agency seeking to reconcilethe Syrian government and the Syrian opposition. She said anti-Western animosity is rampant in the camps, and potentially creating many hundreds of future terrorists.
Raking in money and recruits
Overall, Qaddour said, ISIS has been pulling in as much as $1 million a day from various sources in Syria and Iraq alone, from extortion of local officials, taxes on ships trying to cross the Euphrates River and other sources.
And it has become far more ambitious in its plots and designs.
“The fact that ISIS has been accumulating so much logistical and financial support is something that has been alarming and concerning for those of us who have heard for some time now that the U.S. is considering maybe withdrawing from Syria and thinking that its mission there is over,” Qaddour said.
The Biden administration has said it has no intention of withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria or elsewhere in the region. And Biden himself, in his remarks Thursday, vowed that U.S. forces would hunt down the rest of ISIS just as it did al-Qurasyhi, before he detonated a bomb, killing himself and numerous members of his family.
“We will come after you and find you," Biden said.
Many Syria watchers, including Qaddour, say the administration has been sending mixed signals about its commitment.
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Dreading a US pullout
Without U.S. support in the rebel-held areas of Syria, Qaddour added, ISIS “can continue their resurgence unhindered. They're not going to take the U.S.-led coalition head on, but they're hoping we withdraw so they can take over then.”
Anne Speckhard, a longtime ISIS analyst who has interviewed more than 250 of its members, said the group's ambitious assault on the Gweiran prison in northeast Syria last monthwas actually the second time the group has tried such an attack in recent months, and that it is part of a coordinated – and worrisome – campaign.
In that assault, ISIS fighters used car bombs and heavy weapons to break free some of their most hardened comrades incarcerated there, even as the facility was surrounded by Kurdish-led, U.S.-allied forces.
Although it was the organization’s biggest offensive in years, it followed a series of smaller, guerilla-style attacks. Three years earlier, U.S. and allied forces had declared ISIS all but dead after driving it out of its self-declared caliphate.
“They definitely have, and have had, the dream of ‘breaking the walls’ and releasing prisoners and thereby reinvigorating their ranks,” Speckhard said.
ISIS's predecessor, al-Qaida in Iraq, did the same thing at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in 2013, she said. That effort significantly expanded its ranks through a combination of freeing some of its hardened fighters and also enlisting the aid of foreign fighters from other countries.
In the recent jailbreak, ISIS reclaimed between 200 and 500 members, according to Speckhard and others. “That’s a serious number for the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) to try to round up and contend with,” she said. “How skilled they are is unknown, but ISIS is trying to regrow, no doubt about it.”
Speckhard has also seen evidence of increasing, and successful, ISIS external operations and fundraising far from its center in Syria and Iraq.
“Chillingly, we found evidence of fundraising in Europe for ISIS wives,” in some cases involving "European men who marry them over the internet and then send funds to them to live in the camps and to help them escape,” Speckhard said.
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'A catastrophic blow'
On Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki described the killing of al-Qurayshi as one of the most significant operations in the U.S. war on terror since the 9/11 attacks, saying it delivered "a catastrophic blow to ISIS."
Even Republicans grudgingly praised Biden. "It was a significant operation. I'll give credit where credit is due on the strike," said Texas Sen. John Cornyn.
Others cautioned that the Biden administration should not take its eye off of ISIS, even as it transitions from one leader to the next.
“This is a win for antiterrorism. It's a win for the Biden administration,” said retired Army Lt. Col. Douglas Ollivant, the former director for Iraq at the National Security Council during both the Bush and Obama administrations. “But let's not kid ourselves that this is going to move the needle in a significant way on either counterterrorism writ large, or for that matter, the Biden administration's approval ratings.”
Ollivant, who also served in senior Department of Defense policy roles on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he worries that the recent jailbreak is an omen of more trouble to come.
“It showed some interesting levels of command and control and sophistication,” by ISIS, Ollivant said. “So while this will denigrate ISIS command and control, let’s not overplay it."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ISIS leader killed by US in Syria, but group has expanded global reach
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