📚The TL;DR📝

1. ISIS: a transnational Islamist extremist group that once controlled large swaths of Iraq and Syria from 2014-2019; now, affiliates carry on their mission internationally.

2. ISIS was formed during the Iraq War as the Islamic State in Iraq, before capturing a wide swath of Syria and Iraq and waging a losing war against an international coalition.

3. Without physical territory to rule, ISIS projects terror and propaganda internationally, inspiring lone-wolf attacks worldwide.

4. The rise of social media, generative AI, and unregulated cryptocurrency platforms makes it easier than ever for ISIS to translate, create, and disseminate propaganda. 

5. ISIS takes advantage of crises to propagate its ideology, spreading content to recruit members and incite terror attacks.

📌ISIS Never Left: How Terrorism Operates Today📌

On the tranquil morning of Wednesday, August 20, helicopters whirled in the sky above Atmeh, a Syrian town near the Turkish border. As dawn approached, the helicopters landed, unloading American special forces. Their mission was to neutralize a senior member of the terrorist group ISIS, Abu Hafs al-Qurashi. This was the second American counter-ISIS operation in Syria since December. The first operation came in July, when the U.S. Central Command killed Dhiya’ Zawba Muslih al-Hardani, a senior ISIS leader, and his two adult sons, also members of the group.

But how does ISIS still have a Syrian presence after being ousted in 2019? While it lost territorial control in Syria six years ago following united efforts of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the Assad regime, and international militaries, ISIS did not die. Their affiliates have carried on terrorism and insurgencies elsewhere, and now, ISIS factions prey on vulnerable areas weakened by war and power vacuums, like Syria and Gaza. 

In Syria specifically, ISIS has thrived amidst the political turmoil from the collapse of former President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December. ISIS rejects the new transitional government under President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda leader who is now balancing his radical origins with the realities of governance. While ISIS has capitalized on instability in Syria and Iraq, it and its affiliates have unleashed a new spate of shootings and bombings in the West.

 ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), an Afghanistan-based affiliate pledging allegiance to the group in Syria, has become one of ISIS’s most aggressive branches. They claimed responsibility for a March 2024 attack in a Russian shopping mall that killed 150 people and wounded 500 more. An ISIS-K suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport in 2021 killed almost 200 people, including thirteen U.S. soldiers. Security officials stymied other plots, including attacks on Sweden’s parliament and in the U.S. during last year’s presidential election. These attacks aim to accomplish two goals: undermining the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and punishing the West for its war against ISIS.

Despite ISIS’s fall from the headlines, its revamped global propaganda has found an audience. Western troops in the Middle East and Israel’s war in Gaza have catalyzed radicalization efforts, recruiting destitute individuals from around the world. When ISIS does not have a physical caliphate, it looks to extend its influence and fear globally. ISIS’s international reach has the potential to affect everyone, and conditions are ripe for its reappearance.

Where did ISIS start?

After the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, al-Qaeda launched an ambitious plan to turn Iraq into the center of global jihad. They started by rallying a disparate group of insurgent groups, including small jihadi groups and veterans of the Ba’athist regime, to take over the Sunni-majority city of Fallujah. They briefly captured the city, but American and Iraqi government forces drove them out in a bloody urban battle. Afterwards, AQI went underground, and without territorial control to unite the various factions, it began to splinter. 

 One of these splinter groups was the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), which formed in 2006 and was initially led by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, a longtime Islamist activist in Iraq. The group continued to pledge allegiance to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s leadership, but operated effectively independently. Their base was in the Iraqi desert along the Syrian border, but they operated across Iraq, laying roadside bombs and ambushing American and Iraqi soldiers. In 2010, the U.S. Army killed Abu Omar in a raid, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (no relation) succeeded him. Abu Bakr was more ambitious than Abu Omar; he began his leadership with a series of dramatic raids on American and Iraqi government troops and a spate of bombings targeting both soldiers and civilians. 

 While Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was consolidating control of ISI in 2011, the Syrian Civil War began. Anti-regime and anti-corruption protests inspired by other Arab Spring uprisings began in Syria, and Bashar al-Assad responded with force. The Syrian Army fired on protestors and tortured and executed political prisoners. These human rights violations escalated into a civil war when Sunni defectors from the Syrian Army formed the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to overthrow the al-Assad regime. Internal fragmentation attracted al-Qaeda militants, capitalizing on the conflict. Al-Baghdadi had the opportunity to transform his band of insurgents into a state.

In 2013, ISI crossed from its stronghold in Iraq’s Anbar province to eastern Syria, seizing territory and gaining a reputation for brutality. Some Islamist rebels joined with ISI to create ISIS as we know it today: the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (also known as ISIL or Da’esh). ISIS quickly conquered a wide swath of Eastern Syria, imposing Islamic law, collecting taxes, and policing cities. ISIS officially split from al-Qaeda in 2013, and by 2014, the two groups were in a state of open war, competing for the role of dominant jihadist group. It conquered most significant cities in eastern Syria in 2014, establishing a capital in al-Raqqah. ISIS joined with Sunni insurgents in western Iraq to capture Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, without resistance. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS since 2010, declared himself “Caliph” after these victories. In doing so, he claimed the mantle of chief Muslim spiritual and civil leader, becoming the first caliph since 1931. The group announced this claim to global Islamic leadership by changing its name to the Islamic State (IS). 

Where is ISIS now?

In late 2014, the U.S. led an international coalition with Jordan, the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain against ISIS. Kurdish and Iraqi forces helped contain ISIS in 2015. continued U.S. strikes weakened ISIS’s hold, and Iraqi forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led force formed specifically with U.S. aid to combat ISIS, took back Mosul and Al-Raqqah, respectively. Al-Baghdadi’s suicide during a 2019 U.S. special forces raid cemented the end of ISIS’s territorial control. 

After the destruction of the “caliphate” in Syria, the leaders of ISIS did not abandon the cause, but instead expanded their insurgent activities globally. The defeats of IS in Syria and Iraq drew militants’ focus to creating chaos on the international stage. ISIS-linked bombings, shootings, and attacks increased in 2015, killing citizens in Beirut, Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, and Orlando. Lone-wolf independent shootings inspired by violent propaganda spoke to ISIS’s foreign reach.

Despite ISIS’s dramatic 2019 fall, U.S. officials fear new threats are mounting from ISIS affiliates, especially ISIS-Khorasan. After a period of relative quiet, ISIS-K roared back following the collapse of the Afghan government and removal of U.S. forces stationed in the region. UN monitors warn that ISIS-K operates “with relative impunity” in Afghanistan, targeting Shias, the Taliban, and foreigners.

 ISIS developed sophisticated online and video propaganda when it controlled its “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, and ISIS-K carries on that legacy with material designed to incite disaffected Muslims to terrorist acts. ISIS-K’s rhetoric commonly demonizes America for its military interventions in Muslim states. Many terrorist groups view America as a comprehensive enemy to blame for Western imperialism, Zionism, instability, and an outdated world order. Such foreign presences and interference serve ISIS-K’s goals by radicalizing residents in Muslim nations.

ISIS-K produces propaganda videos and articles that are translated into more than a dozen languages to recruit isolated young people, immigrants, and refugees. Artificial intelligence can now generate low-cost material on a large scale, instilling fear in Western officials that ISIS-K’s broad propaganda will lead to individual, hard-to-prevent shootings, stabbings, and vehicular attacks. These lone wolves, attracted by online recruitment information, are often hard to detect. The FBI arrested one such actor last October on suspicion of planning an election day shooting due to communications with a potential ISIS-K recruiter, and only afterwards discovered ISIS-K propaganda on his computer drives, texts in pro-ISIS group chats, and an indirect contribution of $450 in cryptocurrency to ISIS.

The amount of “lone-wolf” terrorism stemming from individuals acting on behalf of ISIS has increased since the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023. ISIS-K has disseminated chilling photos of dead children in Gaza accompanied by phrases like, “Save the Muslims in Gaza by attacking the Jews and Crusaders in the West.” The FBI and Las Vegas police stymied a teenage sympathizer’s plan to build an explosive device on November 28, 2023–not even two months after the first surge of propaganda centered around unfettered violence in Gaza. Within the next year, even more plots emerged, including stabbings at a German festival and a plot against Taylor Swift’s Vienna concert. 

🌎Why It Matters🌎

By marketing the horrors in Gaza, ISIS is trying to incite future terror attacks. They use the Palestinian suffering, as they use the Syrian conflict, to spread ideology. Their multilingualism and social media savvy allow them to expand their platform internationally, compounded by gaps in content moderation and unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges. Last year, ISIS-K used virtual assets, including cryptocurrency, for organizational transfers and international donation collection. In 2020, following their defeat in Syria, ISIS still had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of assets across the Middle East. ISIS also left behind 30,800 displaced people, who the SDF gained custody of across two camps, and are prime targets of radicalization.

Their funds, combined with increasingly cheap propaganda production tools like AI, augment their international reach through translation and resource support. Beyond spreading disinformation, generative AI helps skirt social media content regulations and profiles individuals susceptible to radicalization. At times, it borders on the absurd: supporters used AI to weaponize an episode of Family Guy, displaying the main character reading an Islamic hymn. 

On September 8, an affiliate group in the Eastern Congo, the Allied Democratic Forces, killed at least 60 people with machetes. On September 3, a New York federal judge sentenced ISIS sympathizer Awais Chudhary to nine years in prison for a 2019 plot to attack pedestrians and record the bloodshed. On New Year’s Day, one lone-wolf, a former U.S. Army veteran, killed fourteen people in New Orleans with a pick-up truck flying the ISIS flag. 

ISIS threats are real and present, and have already affected American lives. Radicalization is difficult to predict; ISIS’s ideology being so accessible only heightens that threat. Attacks can happen anywhere, any time, for as long as ISIS’s goal of a caliphate remains unrealized.