What Isis did next: The return of the threat that never left

A masked Islamic State soldier in 2015. The group has this year has provided stark reminders that supporters are still heeding Baghdadi’s call. Photo / Getty Images

Brutal jihadist group once again seeking to launch attacks internationally.

Weeks after the last redoubt of his caliphate fell, Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi made a final appearance on camera, urging his followers to continue in their quest against “the enemy”.

“Our battle today is a battle of attrition,” Baghdadi said in the 2019 video, six months before he was killed in a US raid. “They should know that jihad [holy war] continues until judgment day.” He commanded remaining supporters to attack “crusader France and its allies”.

In the years since, Isis has largely receded from front pages in the west. But this year has provided stark reminders that supporters are still heeding Baghdadi’s call.

An Isis assault on a Moscow concert hall in March killed 143 people. This month six inmates linked with the group took hostages at a prison in southern Russia and were shot dead. France said the same Isis branch had also attempted multiple attacks on its soil.

On Sunday, at least 20 people died in Russia’s Dagestan region after gunmen attacked churches and synagogues in two cities. While no group has yet claimed the attack, the shootings were praised on some Isis-affiliated social media channels.

And officials in Berlin warned this month, as their country hosts the Euro 2024 football championship, that Germany could witness an assault on the same scale as Moscow.

Without a caliphate to draw in fighters from around the world, Isis — now led by Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Qurashi — has taken the battle to its followers, entwining its millenarian ideology with local grievances.

“[Isis-K] has always been very effective at propagating their ideology — what we called the Nike ‘just do it’ approach to terrorism,” said Sir Alex Younger, former head of British intelligence agency MI6, referring to the hyper-violent Afghan branch of Isis behind the Moscow assault.

Isis has drastically expanded its web of affiliates, and Isis-K is increasing its overseas attacks: this year it has also been linked with bombings in Iran that killed nearly 100 people, an attack on a church in Turkey, and a foiled plot to attack Sweden’s parliament.

Created two decades ago amid the insurgency against the US-led occupation of Iraq, the Sunni Muslim Islamist group — allied to al-Qaeda in its early years — later ruled swaths of Iraq and Syria, imposing draconian laws on millions of people. It became synonymous with extreme brutality and mass atrocities. But by 2019 it was territorially defeated, reverting to insurgent tactics and splintering into regional affiliates.

A decade after Isis atrocities were front-page news — with large attacks in Europe, the beheading of journalists and the enslavement of thousands of women and girls, mostly from the Yazidi minority, in Iraq — the latest spate of high-profile attacks has been designed to draw attention, experts said.

“In the eyes of the average person on the street, Isis was done and finished years ago,” said Shiraz Maher, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. “Attacks like these are them saying: ‘don’t forget about us, we’re still here and we still pose a threat’.”

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the late Isis leader, told his followers in a 2019 video: "[The enemy] should know that jihad continues until judgment day." Photo / AP

Current and former security officials say there are signs of growing confidence among Isis and al-Qaeda because the perceived focus of western security services may have shifted — although Younger said a US intelligence warning before the Moscow attack showed western agencies had kept abreast of the threat.

“When we consider the risk of plots against Europe that are directed or enabled from overseas, [Isis-K] is at the forefront of our minds,” said one. Isis-K started operating in 2015 in Afghanistan and Pakistan after the original Isis declared its caliphate. It drew strength from militants who believed that existing groups such as al-Qaeda were not hardline enough.

The affiliate aims to create its own caliphate in Khorasan, a region extending across parts of the Indian subcontinent and central Asia. After the Taliban took back power in Afghanistan in 2021, Isis-K went on to become its most formidable adversary, fighting a bloody insurgency and using Afghanistan as a base for attacks elsewhere.

Isis’s ferocity is still more evident in Africa. According to the Global Terrorism Index, the locus of terrorism has decisively shifted, with Iraq no longer among the 10 countries most affected.

“The Sahel is now the epicentre of terrorism,” said Steve Killelea, lead author of the index, which defines terrorist attacks as the “threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence” by a non‐state actor.

Local Isis affiliates confine their activities to the region rather than attacking internationally, but have shown the group’s trademark brutality. The region now accounted for almost half of all global terrorism deaths, the index found.

Islamist terror has contributed to a number of recent coups in the Sahel, as widespread frustration with civilian governments made military takeovers more palatable. Isis is most active in the border area between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, attacking military outposts and civilians.

It regularly clashes with another Islamist militant group, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, in north and central Mali and in the country’s border regions with Burkina Faso, where the fighting has displaced millions, and Niger. French troops have been ejected from those three countries by military governments, leaving them to fight the Islamists alone or alongside Russian troops and mercenaries.

Many Isis fighters are locals recruited through violent coercion and intimidation, though poverty and grievances against governments also contribute. Some join for ideological reasons, but many were drawn by the promise of regular income, said security officials.

Jihadist groups had exploited “existing local dynamics...and feelings of social exclusion”, said Kholood Khair, director of Confluence Advisory, a Sudanese think-tank, who said she feared jihadis might be drawn into Sudan’s civil war.

Killelea said there was also a “merging of criminal organisations into these movements”, including jihadis protecting criminal networks “for the passage of people, drugs or precious metals through their territory”.

In the Middle East, Isis operations in Iraq and Syria have been greatly diminished from a decade ago. But small attacks persist — one factor keeping the US-led international coalition on the ground in the region.

About 50,000 men, women and children linked to the group remain detained without trial in desolate camps in north-east Syria, since the group’s final stand five years ago. Most are Iraqi or Syrian, but several thousand are foreigners.

Isis routinely stages prison breaks and riots to try to free its detainees. In January 2022, militants stormed a prison in north-east Syria and triggered a 10-day battle that killed more than 500 people and enabled others to escape.

In the Syrian camps, more than half of those held are children. That presents another risk, said Maher at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. “They’ve been held...for five years now, without any attempts to rehabilitate and re-educate them,” he said. “What happens when those children are finally freed?”

Western intelligence agencies have long warned that the camp inhabitants were a “ticking time bomb”, a justification used to prevent or delay their repatriation.

So far there has been no resurgence of 2015-style assaults, in which individuals, often from the west, were trained overseas and sent back home to launch attacks. Instead, the attacks and recruitment by Isis use “a bit of everything...there is no textbook way that it is done”, said Colin Clarke, director of research at The Soufan Center intelligence and security consultancy.

One threat is “lone wolf” attacks by individuals with a hodgepodge of grievances who have consumed radicalising material, often online.

Another risk comes from “enabled” individuals who receive some degree of support from foreign groups. Mohamed Al Bared, an engineering student in the UK, was jailed for life in December for trying to build a kamikaze drone; his encrypted online chats exposed his support for Isis.

But the most potent threat comes from “directed” assaults in which attackers are trained, funded and logistically supported by groups overseas. They were “the most lethal and the most effective, not least because their operational security can be good”, said Clarke.

During the war in Gaza, Isis has called for attacks not just against Israel and its western allies, but also against Jews more broadly, leading to heightened global security fears.

“We haven’t heard the last of Isis,” Maher said, adding that the group could exploit sympathy for Gaza to recruit new followers. “I’d be unsurprised if there’s an attack in the west sometime soon.”

Written by: Raya Jalabi in Beirut, David Pilling in Johannesburg, Aanu Adeoye in Lagos and John Paul Rathbone in London

Additional reporting by: Malaika Kanaaneh Tapper in Beirut

© Financial Times