The U.S.-led effort against the Islamic State has rained down tens of thousands of bombs on the so-called caliphate, dedicated tremendous resources to combat radical influence online and shoring up defenses at home and abroad, yet like a herpes virus, the terrorist group continues to persist.
The ability of ISIS to exist despite the tremendous forces brought against it is due to both the group’s flexible ingenuity and the innate instability of the Middle East, both of which led to the group’s ability to rise.
“I am in favor of dealing them setbacks wherever we can, but I have to temper and moderate this zeal with the recognition that ISIS will survive no matter how we pursue it,” said Graeme Wood, a journalist and author who covers ISIS, at an event at the American Enterprise Institute last week. “ISIS … is like herpes. It can be managed, but never cured. We can deal with the current outbreak with balms and salves, but a prudent policy has to involve working on a longer term strategy to limit those outbreaks altogether and to manage them when they happen.”
Wood has made a career of getting into the heads of jihadis to better understand their motivations. In that time, he has determined that ISIS will continue in some form, despite the best efforts of the U.S.
The experts tend to agree: ISIS does not necessarily need a land caliphate to be a successful terrorist organization.
“Even if the Islamic State doesn’t immediately recover from the demise of its government, it will be buoyed for years to come by spectacular attacks abroad and by its earlier state-building success,” wrote Middle Eastern studies expert Will McCants in a post for the Brookings Institute’s Markaz blog in August.
Conventional counter-terrorism wisdom once argued that destroying the ISIS “parent tumor” in Iraq and Syria would cause the organization to lose legitimacy and popularity. Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter coined the term, and the Obama administration established Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve in order to support local Syrian and Iraqi forces in their fight to retake ISIS-held lands. While the flow of foreign fighters joining the caliphate has stemmed thanks to coalition, ISIS still dominates the jihadi universe.
ISIS survives because it stays one step ahead. During the group’s initial rise in 2013-2014, caliphate spokesmen claimed all faithful Muslims had a duty to travel to and defend the caliphate. That strategy quickly changed in 2015 after the land caliphate in Iraq and Syria became the target of daily coalition air strikes and a resurgent Iraqi military. In response, the terrorist group adapted, releasing a video instructing followers in foreign countries that they should instead conduct attacks on behalf of the caliphate in their home countries.
Like herpes, ISIS persisted. What followed was a spat of attacks inspired or directed by the group in the U.S. and Europe.
Recent military successes are unlikely to have permanent effect on ISIS. Going forward, Wood believes ISIS will continue to persist and evolve as needed, despite the loss of the land caliphate.
“The religious form will be a continued crisis authority, unlikely ever to be concluded,” Wood told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “The military form will be an insurgency in Iraq and Syria, and perhaps elsewhere.”
ISIS’s ability to revert to an insurgency has already been witnessed over the last year. As coalition forces retook key areas like Ramadi and Fallujah, ISIS militants were able to blend in with the population and conduct attacks on civilians. The group was even able to engage in suicide attacks inside Baghdad, a veritable fortress compared to the security of other cities it conquered.
Wood also believes there is a third, more nuanced aspect that could prolong the terrorist group, or a version of it.
“And there will be a third, latent form that will continue to exist in the hearts of many Muslims — a sense that living as a Muslim entails living under a government that recognizes Islam in its laws. This sense will continue to manifest as ISIS for many people,” said Wood.
President Donald Trump ordered his generals Sunday to bring a him a plan to finally defeat ISIS, but solving the problem may require more than just a military strategy.
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