“The military mission to eradicate ISIS in Syria is coming to a rapid end, with ISIS being almost completely destroyed,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced on April 4. “The United States and our partners remain committed to eliminating the small ISIS presence in Syria that our forces have not already eradicated. . . . We expect countries in the region and beyond, plus the United Nations, to work toward peace and ensure that ISIS never re-emerges.”
Donald Trump sounded only slightly less cocksure in his State of the Union address in January. On assuming office, the president said, he had pledged to “work with our allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the earth. One year later, I am proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated almost 100 percent of the territory once held by these killers. . . . But there is much more work to be done.”
The U.S. military has done superb work in punishing ISIS in Syria and Iraq, but the truest sentence in either of these assessments is that last one: There is much more work to be done. If the administration backs out of the region—as the president repeatedly stated was his intention before Syrian president Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical-weapons attack in Douma on April 7—it will revert to the hellish chaos the Obama administration allowed to flourish in 2013-14 and that the U.S. military, freed to do its job by Trump’s arrival in office, has begun to roll back.
The problem is that the president, his rhetoric about “extinguish[ing] ISIS from the face of the earth” aside, seems to think the challenge consists exclusively in regaining territory taken by the terrorist network. But that’s only part of the challenge. Islamic State fighters are mounting guerrilla operations nearly every day in Iraq and Syria. Those attacks don’t make the evening news, but they are ongoing. In eastern Syria—in the towns of Busayrah, Markada, and al-Suwar—ISIS is still engaged in bloody fighting. The same is true in the southern suburbs of Damascus and in numerous other trouble spots in Syria and Iraq.
ISIS may not hold this territory, but it is still able to fight as it rebuilds its forces. In an April 22 broadcast, ISIS spokesman Abu al-Hasan al-Muhajir promised the group would mount a new offensive as soon as the Americans were gone. There is no reason to doubt his claim.
ISIS maintains a global network of terror cells—in Syria and Iraq, in northwest Africa, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Southeast Asia, in Europe and North America. It has taken responsibility for gruesome attacks in Barcelona, London, Marseille, Copenhagen, Brussels, Ottawa, Orlando, and New York City, among many other places. The United States and its allies are very far from ridding the earth of this danger.
Even if we confine our attention to Syria and Iraq, however, a narrow focus on ISIS fails to acknowledge the presence of a reinvigorated al Qaeda. The two networks are engaged in a contest for dominance of what their adherents believe is a nascent caliphate, and it’s important to understand that, in both Syria and the wider Middle East, al Qaeda is the stronger of the two.
ISIS has the greater global infamy at present, but that’s likely because al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has called a temporary halt to attacks in the West while the Sunni militant group regains its position in the Middle East. Al Qaeda has thousands of fighters in Syria and is almost certainly stronger there than ISIS. Indeed some experts believe that, both inside and outside Syria, al Qaeda boasts greater influence and numbers than it has in a generation.
So while Western governments boast of having vanquished ISIS, al Qaeda bides its time with the example of Afghanistan ever in its mind.
In the West, the temptation is to believe the war on terror has already been won or that it’s mainly a law-enforcement problem or that it’s just an expensive mopping-up operation wherever there’s trouble in the Middle East. It is none of those things. It is a war—and in a war, you must go where the enemy is before he comes to you.
