From Caliphate to Insurgency: ISIS Is Not Going Away
The day after ISIL declared its Caliphate, I posted here that it would not last long and that they would devolve into an insurgency.
In any war, the enemy gets a say in when the fighting stops. The Islamic State made clear on Wednesday that it is not done fighting the United States, nor the wider civilized world.
ISIS quickly claimed responsibility for an explosion in the city of Manbij in northern Syria, saying through its news agency that a suicide bomber targeted American soldiers on a routine patrol.
The spokesperson for Operation Inherent Resolve, the American-led coalition against ISIS, confirmed that American service members were killed in the blast, but did not specify how many. Media reports indicate that at least three or four troops died. It is unclear how many Syrian civilians or allied forces were also killed.
It is probably not a coincidence that the attack occurred just weeks after President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw American troops from Syria. When announcing the withdrawal, Trump said the U.S. had defeated ISIS in Syria, "[his] only reason for being there."
The bombing is a sober reminder that ISIS is not defeated and remains a threat. It is doubtful that the U.S., or anyone else, knows the exact number of ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, but no public estimate is close to zero. In August, the United Nations released a report saying that ISIS still had up to 20,000 to 30,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria and "hundreds of millions" of dollars to use. If those figures were true, that would mean that ISIS suffered no appreciable net loss of fighters since August 2014, when then-President Barack Obama first ordered airstrikes against the terrorist group. The month after airstrikes began, the CIA assessed that ISIS had between 20,000 and 31,500 members across Iraq and Syria.
On Dec. 19, the day of Trump's announcement, a spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve estimated that ISIS still had 2,000 to 2,500 fighters just in Hajin, the group's final territorial stronghold in Syria.
Many of ISIS' top leaders and important middle-ranked men presumably remain alive. Moreover, ISIS has, from the last week of July through mid-December, claimed 1,922 operations around the world, according to Thomas Joscelyn. Nearly half of those operations, 946, occurred in Iraq, while another 599 occurred in Syria. Many of the group's so-called provinces also carried out these operations, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan and in Sinai.
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Originally Posted by PJL
