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They say you can lose the battle but win the way. According to The Daily Beast, ISIS may not be losing anything:
ISIS continues to gain substantial ground in Syria, despite nearly 800 airstrikes in the American-led campaign to break its grip there.
At least one-third of the country’s territory is now under ISIS influence, with recent gains in rural areas that can serve as a conduit to major cities that the so-called Islamic State hopes to eventually claim as part of its caliphate. Meanwhile, the Islamic extremist group does not appear to have suffered any major ground losses since the strikes began. The result is a net ground gain for ISIS, according to information compiled by two groups with on-the-ground sources.
In Syria, ISIS “has not any lost any key terrain,” Jennifer Cafarella, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War who studies the Syrian conflict, explained to The Daily Beast.
Even U.S. military officials privately conceded to The Daily Beast that ISIS has gained ground in some areas, even as the Pentagon claims its seized territory elsewhere, largely around the northern city of Kobani. That’s been the focus of the U.S.-led campaign, and ISIS has not been able to take the town, despite its best efforts.
Other than that, they are short on specifics.
And it isn’t only The lively The Daily Beast that’s reporting it. NPR interviewed Audie Cornish puts the question to Jennifer Cafarella, a fellow at the Institute for the Study of War:
CORNISH: So first describe what’s meant by gaining ground here. Are we talking about ISIS taking territory where there are many people? Or is this territory that’s not contested or highly populated?
CAFARELLA: What we’ve seen in recent months is ISIS begin to shift resources into central Syria and into western Syria, taking advantage of small ISIS cells that had existed in the past and really utilizing a corridor of terrain that is unpopulated and relatively sparse in eastern Homs.
CORNISH: So is that moving weapons? Moving people? What does that mean?
CAFARELLA: It includes both moving people and weapons. So we see ISIS convoys emerging in places like the outskirts of Damascus and inside of the Qalamoun corridor on the border with Lebanon. That is an increase from ISIS’s past involvement in that area.
CORNISH: So what’s the concern here? I mean, you’re describing remote areas, not very populated.
CAFARELLA: Well, this isn’t the sort of thunder run on Mosul-style ISIS expansion. It is nonetheless an increased ISIS presence in an area that has predominantly been either held by the Assad regime or by rebels. So the expansion of ISIS into this zone greatly complicates the ability of the international coalition to conduct airstrikes against ISIS and to actually deter ISIS momentum and prevent further expansion.
CORNISH: Now, is this all that much of a surprise given that the U.S. has focused primarily on Iraq?
CAFARELLA: No, it is not a surprise given that the current coalition campaign in Syria is predominantly focused on deterring the ISIS momentum in Kobani and rolling that back, as well as disrupting leadership networks and ISIS’s ability to extract oil revenue. However, it does highlight the limitations of a strategy limited to disrupting ISIS inside of Syria, which does not actually prevent ISIS from establishing new strongholds and new networks in differing terrain inside of the country.
Despite recent battlefield setbacks in Iraq and Syria, ISIS is gaining influence among small jihadist groups in North Africa and South Asia, raising concerns that its use of extreme tactics like mass executions and beheadings could spread to new arenas, U.S. officials and counterterrorism experts tell NBC News.
While al Qaeda apparently retains solid support among jihadist groups along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, at least five militant Islamic groups — all of them either previous al Qaeda supporters or al Qaeda affiliates — have over the past five months either pledged allegiance to ISIS or loudly praised its establishment of a self-declared “caliphate” stretching from southern Syria through northern Iraq:
On Nov. 10, Egypt’s Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (“Supporters of the Holy House”), which reportedly has killed hundreds of people — mostly Egyptian soldiers – on the Sinai Peninsula since the 2011 Egyptian revolution, pledged loyalty to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It also declared its stronghold part of the ISIS caliphate, calling it the Sinai Province of the Islamic State. The group has two wings, one in the Sinai and the other in the Nile Delta, the latter of which remains loyal to al Qaeda.
On Sept. 24, a little-known Algerian group, Jund al Khalifa (“Soldiers of the Caliphate”), executed a French mountain guide, Herve Gourdel. In announcing the killing, the group said it was heeding the orders of ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani to kill Westerners “in any manner … especially the spiteful and filthy French” because of France’s support for military action against its fighters. (Algeria last week announced it had killed three leaders of the group who had participated in the beheading.)
On Aug. 26, a small number of top Pakistani Taliban officials split from the central leadership and pledged allegiance to al-Baghdadi, calling themselves “The Pakistani Taliban- Jamaat Al-Ahrar” (“The Freedom Fighters Group”). A spokesman for the group publicly supported the Dec. 16 Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar that killed 145 people, including 132 children.
Two days earlier, on Aug.24, the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram also declared a caliphate in territory it had seized in the country’s northern reaches, suggesting in a video that ISIS has served as its model. While the groups have not formally allied themselves to one another, they have issued statements of mutual support. For example, ISIS fighters in Syria referenced Boko’s kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in the town of Chibok when they announced they had captured and sold hundreds of Yazidi women in northern Iraq in the summer.
Earlier in the month, the Philippines-based Islamic terror groups Abu Sayyaf and the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) posted videos on YouTube in which their leaders pledged allegiance to ISIS, though Philippine military officials told Agence France Presse there was no indication that either group was actively supporting al-Baghdadi’s group.
The U.S. counterterrorism community is divided over the extent to which the pledges of support for ISIS represent a broader philosophical shift away from al Qaeda among radical Islamic groups around the globe. There also have been reports of small jihadist groups along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border declaring allegiance to ISIS, but U.S. officials say they have not detected widespread defections within the al Qaeda stronghold.
And now ISIS is expanding its activity and franchise in Europe, as European countries scramble to try to disrupt networks and plots and arreset those believed to be actively working to murder its citizens or officials:
European security services in recent weeks have received indications that the extremist group ISIS may have started directing European adherents in Syria and Iraq to launch attacks back in their home countries, a senior European counterterrorism official told CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank.
The official said security agencies in a number of European countries were intensely investigating several groups of returnees from Syria and Iraq, including individuals back on Belgian soil, who they suspect could be plotting terrorist attacks.
Belgian authorities said the raids Thursday, in which two suspects were killed, were part of an operation investigating a cell that included people coming back from Syria and that was about to carry out major terrorist attacks in Belgium.
The European official told Cruickshank that investigators were working around the clock to learn about the potential attack plans of the returned ISIS fighters.
“This threat is not just about Belgium tonight, but it’s also other European countries as well,” Cruickshank said.
What is the nature of this threat?
Beyond what has emerged about the Belgian raids, details remain sketchy.
The European counterterrorism official told Cruickshank that there were indications that returnees from Iraq and Syria had been directed by the ISIS leadership to launch attacks on European soil in revenge for air strikes in Syria and Iraq.
“That would be a game changer because ISIS up to this point has not orchestrated any terrorist plots in the West,” Cruickshank said. “There have been some ISIS fighters who have come back but they have launched plots on their own steam.”
The official named France, the United Kingdom and Belgium as countries facing a particular threat and said counterterrorism agencies in Germany are also on high alert.
And so it accelerates — a battle where “I am Charlie” doesn’t accurately explain the developing situation, or the trending.
graphic via shutterstock.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.