ISIL goes global

ISIL goes global

As its territory shrinks, the Islamic State is transforming itself into a global terror group.

By

Roy Gutman

7/17/16, 6:30 AM CET

http://www.politico.eu/article/isil-goes-global-nice-bastille-day-attack-istanbul-turkey-syria-iraq/

ISTANBUL — Welcome to a new ISIL age of terrorism.

Nearly 500 people have died in a series of attacks on civilian targets since June 28, when suicide bombers besieged Istanbul international airport, killing 45, and culminating with Thursday’s attack in Nice that claimed 84 lives.

Even as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s self-declared “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq shrinks under military pressure, the extremist group is transforming itself into a global terror organization that both directs and inspires terrorism much as al Qaeda did in the previous decade when its affiliates or sympathizers bombed tourist resorts, cafés, mosques and train stations across the world.

ISIL on Saturday claimed credit for the Bastille Day attack in Nice. The group did not, however, say it was behind the attack in Turkey, or the three bombs that exploded on July 4 in Saudi Arabia, one of them close to the mosque where Prophet Mohammad is buried, killing four people. It did boast of sponsoring and directing an assault on a café in Bangladesh, in which 21 people, including nine Italians, were killed. The greatest carnage in the recent spate of violence was in Baghdad on July 3 where ISIL-linked attacker detonated an explosives-laden truck in the heart of the capital’s bustling commercial district, killing 292.

The attacks on Paris last November and Brussels in March were also part of the group’s strategy of spreading terror beyond the Levant.

In Turkey: ISIL never claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport last month Defne Karadeniz/Getty Images

In Turkey: ISIL never claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport last month Defne Karadeniz/Getty Images

‘Super Al Qaeda’

The attacks come on the heels of major setbacks for ISIL on the ground — in Iraq, where government forces regained control of Fallujah at the end of June, and in Syria, where U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters have claimed most of Manbij, a strategic town in the northeast of the country.

The militant group acknowledged the territorial losses in their media and Internet sites, saying the attacks on civilians around the globe are a response to their enemies, wresting land from them, according to experts who follow ISIL communications closely.

“You, the international community did not want us to become a state, focused on our land. Now we will move on to a clandestine, terrorist mode of organization,” is the gist of their statements, said Guidere. “What they are saying is, ‘The more you hit us, the more we will become Al Qaeda,’” he said. But this will be a “super Al Qaeda,” drawing its militants from across the Muslim world — including those in Europe — not just from Arab states that was Al Qaeda’s main recruiting ground.

To coordinate and direct overseas attacks, ISIL has set up an external operations wing that trains militants in Iraq and Syria and dispatches them abroad and also guides overseas supporters, according to Rohan Gunaratna, who heads an institute on terrorism at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

In Bangladesh: Citizens help a police officer injured during an ISIL attack on a restaurant packed with foreigners in Dhaka on July 1 | AFP via Getty Images

In Bangladesh: Citizens help a police officer injured during an ISIL attack on a restaurant packed with foreigners in Dhaka on July 1 | AFP via Getty Images

“The Islamic State is transforming from a state-building organization, a Caliphate-building organization, into an operations-based organization,” he said, comparing them to the French Foreign Legion. The group’s global operation unit, Gunaratna said, was set up in imitation of Western governments’ armies that have always had a foreign division.

Paul Pillar, an academic who spent nearly three decades with the CIA, said an external operations wing was a logical next step in ISIS’ evolution.

“The military pressure that the so-called caliphate is under in both Iraq and Syria probably does increase the likelihood that the group is trying to turn more to asymmetric means of response,” he said in a phone interview.

ISIS “has shown a willingness to create a quite elaborate infrastructure to run its mini-state in Iraq and Syria. It would be surprising if they had not created an infrastructure for operations overseas,” Pillar said.

In addition to pre-planned attacks, ISIL has taken credit for assaults by “lone wolf” perpetrators, who formally affiliate with the extremist group over social media postings during the course of their assault that often involve hostage taking and long stand-offs with local security forces. Such requests to claim an attack in the group’s name are immediately granted, experts say.

‘Soldiers of the Caliphate’

Examples of this type of attack include an assault in December 2015 in San Bernardino, California, where a husband-and-wife team are accused of killing 14 people, and last month’s massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where gunman Omar Mateen is accused of killing 49. In both cases, ISIL accorded the killers the honorary title of “Soldier of the Caliphate.”

The requirement for earning this title is that the individual must pledge allegiance to the self-declared “Caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, followed by a written or filmed “evidence” of a violent act, Guidere said. Submitting a video of a beheading is a good example of such pledge, Guidere said. If the rank of Soldier of the Caliphate is given to an attacker who has survived the violence, he or she’s imposed on others, that person has received the right to lead operations in the name of the Caliphate, he said.

In Bangladesh: Peace activists gather at a vigil following the ISIL attack on a Dhaka restaurant | Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

In Bangladesh: Peace activists gather at a vigil following the ISIL attack on a Dhaka restaurant | Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

In Dakha, ISIL not only took credit for the execution of patrons at a café popular with foreigners, but actually directed the operation, said Reuven Erlich, a retired Israeli colonel who heads a center on intelligence and terrorism at the Lauder School of Government in Israel.

ISIL rushed to claim it just a few hours after the assault began, posting photos of some of the attackers and announcing the death toll long before Bangladeshi security forces stormed the location.

Experts had different views on the timing of the latest attacks, which occurred during Ramadan, a holy month for Muslims, but also around the second anniversary of Baghdadi’s declaration of the Islamic State and the caliphate in eastern Syria and northern Iraq. He declared it on June 28, 2014, after the militant group took control of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city.

Holy month of ‘calamity’

The group that has been good in communicating the reasons behind its assaults on Paris and Brussels in November and March, respectively, has left experts guessing of their motivations to strike at that particular time in three countries. However, they did issue a warning — two weeks before the start of the Muslim holy month, when Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, the ISIL spokesman, said: “Get prepared, be ready to make it a month of calamity everywhere for the non-believers.”

The assault in Turkey could have been part of the Holy month campaign, experts say, although they also mention Turkey’s rapprochement with Israel as a reason for the attacks. It angered many Islamist groups, said Magnus Ransdorp, a scholar who directs the Center for Asymetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defense College.

In Iraq: A woman lights candles at the sight of a July 3 bombing in Baghdad's Karrada neighborhood. A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden minibus ahead of the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan | Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP via Getty Images

In Iraq: A woman lights candles at the sight of a July 3 bombing in Baghdad’s Karrada neighborhood. A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden minibus ahead of the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan | Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP via Getty Images

Yet another reason could be Turkey’s decision to open Incirlik airbase to U.S. warplanes a year ago for conducting airstrikes on ISIL positions in Syria. (Turkey on Saturday closed the base and cut off power in the wake of an abortive military coup against the government.) Whatever the exact reason, the bombing of the main international airport will dissuade tourists from visiting what has been one of the major tourist destinations on the Mediterranean, robbing Turkey of billions of dollars in national income.

One of the most ominous aspects to the new ISIL structure is that it appears to be geared to continue functioning and facilitating lethal attacks of its own choosing, almost at will on four continents even as the group loses territory in Iraq and Syria because of the U.S.-led bombing campaign and advances of Western-backed local fighters.

NATO wants to fight ISIL

At the NATO summit, the Alliance’s chief Jens Stoltenberg said training and backing local fighters to take on ISIL is “often our best weapon against violent extremism.”

He told a forum before the Warsaw summit last week that, “For our nations to be safe, it’s not enough to keep our defenses strong, we must help to make our partners stronger.” There was talk at the summit of increasing assistance to the Iraqi military in its fight against ISIL, and pledges of West’s financial commitment to the Afghan military and police, as well as aid for Tunisia as NATO aims to get more involved in the anti-ISIL campaign, according to an AP report.

By the end of the two-day summit, though, no clear role has been determined for the Alliance on the southern front as it steps up its defenses on its eastern flank against Russia. NATO had committed to deploying AWACS surveillance planes to assist the U.S.-led coalition.

That is unlikely to curb ISIL’s influence as it spreads beyond Iraq and Syria, where the city of Raqqa serves as the capital. Once a group of militants, or “Soldiers of the caliphate,” as they are known, capture territory and extend control over it, they are authorized to establish a “Vilayet” — an administrative unit in the territories in the Ottoman empire.

Any one of them can become the new epicenter of ISIL, Gunaratna said. Vilayets now exist in such far-flung locations as Nigeria, Yemen, the Caucasus, and Khorasan, in the Pakistan tribal areas. There are also “aspiring Vilayets” closer to Europe, in Libya and Egypt, and even on the Continent itself, in the Balkans, he said. Further away in Asia, they reportedly exist in the Philippines, Indonesia and Bangladesh.

ISIL has suffered because of its territorial loss, but it is far too early to declare victory. “Their image as an invincible force has been affected,” Gunaratna said. “But ISIL is still a formidable terrorist group.”