Opinion

Terrorism warning lights are ‘blinking red again.’ This group is a big reason.

But this evil group is hard to keep down — a task made all the more difficult if the United States winds up removing its remaining troops from Syria and Iraq prematurely. While the world’s attention has been riveted elsewhere — in particular on Ukraine and Gaza — the Islamic State has been staging a slow-motion resurgence, not only in its Iraq-Syria heartland but also as far afield as Afghanistan and Africa.

In July, U.S. Central Command warned: “ISIS is on pace to more than double the total number of attacks they claimed in 2023. The increase in attacks indicates ISIS is attempting to reconstitute following several years of decreased capability.” The United Nations estimates that the group has 3,000 to 5,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq. “This year has been the worst year since we defeated Islamic State,” the co-commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces told the Wall Street Journal last month.

ISIS has powerful affiliates across Africa including in the Sahel region (stretching from Mauritania to Sudan), Somalia, Congo and Mozambique. A group associated with the Islamic State carried out a horrifying massacre on Sept. 1 in northeastern Nigeria, killing at least 170 villagers.

Meanwhile, the Islamic State offshoot in Afghanistan, known as Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K), has become a leading sponsor of international terrorism. Earlier this year, it claimed responsibility for major attacks in Russia and Iran, which killed nearly 250 people. The U.S. government had tried to warn both Moscow and Tehran — to no avail. Austrian authorities are more receptive to U.S. intelligence: A planned attack on Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna, intended to kill thousands, was thwarted in August, thanks to warnings from the CIA. More recently, ISIS-K has claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Kabul that killed six people, while knife-wielding inmates claiming to be affiliated with ISIS-K killed four guards at a Russian prison.

The United Nations now assesses that ISIS-K represents “the greatest external terrorist threat” to Europe. The threat to the U.S. homeland is smaller but very real. In June, Harvard professor Graham Allison and former CIA deputy director Michael J. Morell, writing in Foreign Affairs, warned that terrorism warning lights were “blinking red again,” just as they were before 9/11, and the resurgence of the Islamic State was a big part of the reason. Sure enough, on Friday, Canadian authorities arrested an alleged ISIS adherent for plotting to attack a Jewish center in Brooklyn on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

“ISIS is exploiting our lack of focus on them to regroup, not just in Afghanistan, but also in parts of Africa and Syria,” Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who investigated al-Qaeda and now leads the Soufan Group security consultancy, emailed me. Noting the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks this week, Soufan cited the 9/11 Commission’s assessment that a “failure of imagination” kept the United States from preventing them. “My concern is that we are once again failing to imagine the possibility of such threats materializing.”

The issue now is what the United States and its allies should do to stop this growing threat before it metastasizes into something far more dangerous. Much of the counterterrorism playbook has been well-developed over the past several decades, including intelligence collection and sharing, enhanced security for high value targets such as transportation hubs and concerts, and targeted raids on terrorist cells and leaders. While law enforcement and intelligence agencies are necessarily in the lead, the U.S. military still has a vital role to play — if one much reduced from the heyday of the “war on terror.”

There are about 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq and 900 in Syria as part of the anti-ISIS mission known as Operation Inherent Resolve. They are mostly focused on providing advice, intelligence, air cover, logistics and other forms of support to Iraqi security forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces, but they also sometimes take part in combat operations. U.S. Special Operations forces mounted an major raid in late August with their Iraqi counterparts in Anbar province, targeting senior ISIS leaders. Fifteen ISIS fighters were killed and seven U.S. soldiers injured.

The problem is that it’s unclear how long the U.S. military presence in Iraq and Syria will continue. As president, Trump tried to remove U.S. troops from Syria before being dissuaded by senior national security officials. He could try again if he comes back into office. The loss of U.S. forces in Syria could have a severe impact on the operational capabilities of the Syrian Democratic Forces, including their ability to continue holding 9,000 ISIS detainees in a series of makeshift prisons. If some of those prisoners are able to break out, that could help turbocharge an ISIS renaissance.

The small U.S. deployment in Syria is dependent for logistical support on the larger U.S. force in Iraq, and the future of that force is also in doubt. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, a Shiite who is close to Iranian-backed proxy groups, has been pushing for the removal of U.S. troops. Iraqi and U.S. negotiators have now reportedly reached agreement on a plan that would lead hundreds of U.S. soldiers to depart in 2025 and the rest in 2026. Although some U.S. forces may remain behind in a purely advisory capacity, this risks repeating the very mistake — the pullout of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 by then-President Barack Obama — that allowed the rise of ISIS in the first place. If U.S. troops leave Iraq, they are unlikely to remain in Syria.

Afghanistan also offers a warning sign of the potentially dangerous consequences of premature U.S. military withdrawals — in this case, a bipartisan mistake negotiated by Trump and implemented by President Joe Biden.

“Terrorists are the consummate opportunists and ISIS is no different,” terrorism analyst Bruce Hoffman, a colleague at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “With an incompetent security regime in Afghanistan and the U.S. military now long gone, ISIS-K has seized on this security vacuum to marshal its resources to project power far beyond South Asia.” The United States is now forced to resort in Afghanistan to an “over the horizon strategy,” that, Hoffman noted, “is clearly inadequate.”

The United States is also struggling to deal with the growing ISIS threat in Africa after roughly 100 U.S. troops were withdrawn from Chad and 1,000 from Niger at the request of their governments. The pullout from Niger followed a military coup in that country that was denounced by Washington. While U.S. military personnel were leaving Niger, Russian advisers were arriving — at the very same base once occupied by the Americans. You can bet that the Russians in Niger are there to exploit local resources, not to cooperate in counterterrorism operations.

Daniel Byman, a terrorism analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me, “I’d like to see more of a SOF presence and security force assistance in sub-Saharan Africa,” but the challenge will be to find willing and capable local partners.

Byman cautioned against panic: “ISIS is a shadow of what it was in 2014, and it’s important to keep that in mind.” But the group’s resurgence is nevertheless a warning that just because our attention has shifted, that doesn’t mean threats have necessarily gone away. Dealing with this vile terrorist group will test the staying power of a superpower with an understandable, and bipartisan, desire to forget the “forever wars.”