The Islamic State’s ability to sustain itself through recruitment, propaganda and financing of its operations have bolstered its ability to survive as the U.S.-led military campaign against it has faltered. But U.S. officials are focusing on changing that dynamic and hoping to alter the military balance as well.
In testimony before Congress this week, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford and John Allen, the outgoing coordinator for the coalition’s fight against the extremist group, both said more needs to be done to counter the group’s successes in spreading its message and gathering foreign extremists to join its fight.
“To be successful, the coalition’s military campaign must reduce [the Islamic State’s] territorial control, destroy its warfighting capability and undermine its brand and aura of invincibility,” Dunford told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
Foreign fighters are a key source of manpower for the Islamic State. A report released at the end of September by the House Homeland Security Committee estimated that more than 25,000 foreigners were fighting for the group in Syria, including more than 250 U.S. citizens. The United Nations estimates that number has grown to about 30,000 from 104 countries, twice the number as a year ago.
The congressional report said the United States and its allies were not doing enough to stem the flow of extremists to Syria. After returning from a trip to the region, Dunford told the Senate Armed Services panel that cutting off the supply of foreign fighters, along with better intelligence, is the most important improvement needed to move the campaign against the Islamic State forward.
He said after speaking with a U.S. team working on the issue “one of the challenges that became clear is we really don’t have amongst all the coalition a kind of a common view of where the foreign fighters come from, how they move back and forth into the area, but more importantly not much of a track on where they go once they leave back to their home countries.
“From my perspective we need to do much more, one, to get a view of foreign fighters as a whole, and to make sure we maximize the legal, the military and the political tools that are available to us to cut off the flow of foreign fighters,” Dunford added.
“We need all nations working together at each link in the chain,” Allen told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday.
The group’s continuing ability to recruit foreign fighters is a key success of its propaganda campaign, which the U.S.-led coalition has so far failed to effectively counter. Efforts to put what Allen called “an Arab face and a Muslim voice” through cooperation with the countries in the region most affected by its rise have not significantly challenged that success.
Also Wednesday, Mark Wallace, CEO of the Counter-Extremism Project, told a House Oversight subcommittee that the weaponization of social media platforms by extremist groups is “a cancer that continues to grow unabated.”
Even al-Qaeda is beginning to benefit from the success of the Islamic State’s propaganda, said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.
“Al-Qaeda has quietly engaged in an image makeover,” he told the subcommittee. “Using [the Islamic State’s] over-the-top brutality as a foil, al-Qaeda has depicted itself as a more reasonable and controllable entity, one that represents an extension of the aspirations of people in the areas it operates, rather than being purely imposed by force.”
Meanwhile, legislators from a number of coalition nations agreed on the need for better targeting of the Islamic State’s financing during meetings this week in Washington with members of Congress and other U.S. officials.
“As current military operations have had limited success against ISIS and other terrorist organizations, it is critical that we have a full understanding of their financing operations and how we can work together to more effectively intercept the funding they use to spread terror,” said Rep. Robert Pittenger, R-N.C., who organized the conference.
The group’s financial lifeline has become a key target of a stepped-up military campaign, fueled by intelligence gleaned from a raid in eastern Syria in May that killed Abu Sayyaf, the Islamic State’s financial mastermind.
“We took from the raid seven terabytes of information — hard drives, thumb drives, DVDs, CDs, paper — and the exploitation of that material is giving us very important insights into the organization of [the Islamic State] and its economic portfolio,” Allen told the Foreign Relations panel.
