Its Caliphate and leader are gone, but ISIS is still dangerous
An unidentified fighter in Syria’s Idlib province in 2012. Photo by Nasser Nouri.
NEW YORK — The Islamic State is without its Caliphate or its caliph, but its ideology persists and can be expected to spread where conditions are ripe for it, said two researchers who spoke about the group’s future at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City on Tuesday evening.
“I had one ISIS follower say to me, ‘The Caliphate lives on as long as there is one street in one neighborhood where Islamic law is implemented with a properly constituted Caliphate in charge,’” said Graeme Wood, a staff writer at The Atlantic who has reported extensively on the group.
Wood wrote a seminal piece on ISIS’ goals in 2015 in which he outlined an apocalyptic vision and religious fervor that he said was the source of the gruesome violence that had the world’s attention. He recently penned an article on his soul-altering consequences of watching graphic footage of the group’s atrocities.
The death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Oct. 26 during a U.S. military raid on his secret compound in northern Syria was an unexpected subject of conversation at the event, “ISIS Without the Caliphate: What Happens Now?”
The loss of Baghdadi, who killed himself and two of his children by detonating a suicide vest, won’t disrupt ISIS’ operations. Baghdadi’s role was symbolic, Wood said, but the significance of that shouldn’t be understated.
“The symbolism is what is important about this individual,” he said. “He was someone who was putting himself forward as the continuer of a fantastic version of what classical Islam was, and the very fact of his being a symbol of that was able to get 40,000-plus people to immigrate to Syria.”
Devorah Margolin, a researcher at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said she expects Baghdadi’s death will exacerbate existing strife within the organization. Prospects for a successor are less concerning to her than what happens among former fighters and their families.
Tens of thousands are being held in camps in Syria. There are about 68,000 in the biggest camp. Ninety-five percent of them are women and children, and more than half of the children are younger than 11.
The children are victims, Margolin said, and the women should be considered on a case-by-case basis. Even so, women played an important role in the Caliphate. Baghdadi had made a recent address calling for his followers to free their women so they could restore the Caliphate.
Women joined ISIS for reasons that ranged from coercion to passionate support, and the hardliners remain as important to the ideology as they were to the Caliphate. “They’re really seen as the carriers and the torchbearers of the ideology, and they’re there to educate the next generation,” Margolin said.
She noted that 9/11 was the result of an ideology created three decades earlier. With ISIS affiliates in existence around the world, it has ample haven to survive. Combat can’t defeat it, she said, so the complicated grievances that underlie its adoption by so many people will need to be addressed.
“It’s an important and a hard conversation for us all to have,” she said.
There are a few factors that work against a potential ISIS resurgence, Wood said. The U.S. and other nations did nothing to stop its growth in 2013, three years after it split from Al Qaeda over differences in strategy. The group wasn’t viewed as a threat because it appeared to be limited to northern Syria and Iraq.
“And I think we have learned since then that that’s not a great strategy for handling international terrorism, to just give them a place that’s far away from us and let them do what they want to do,” Wood said. “That turned out to be a magnet for jihadists from all over the world.”
Instead, concerned countries like the U.S. should use any methods necessary to prevent the establishment of a functioning ISIS governmental administration, he said. The Caliphate was funded by taxes like any other state. With current conditions and unrest making Iraq more ripe for ISIS’ appeal than it was in 2010, Wood said, any organized takeover of territory represents a serious threat. Territory made ISIS a powerful and sustainable entity. The Caliphate was what Baghdadi succeeded in delivering to his followers that Al Qaeda had not.
That made him a visionary in their eyes. They are more likely to try to revive what he did than to create something new, Wood said. That could happen anywhere that government is weak and considered illegitimate by a population that isn’t having its basic needs met. Places to watch are areas in Yemen, the southern Philippines and the Sahel region of Africa, an area cutting across the north of the continent.
A successor can replace Baghdadi but will not be able to play the role he did, said Wood. He had a long history in service of jihadism, a background as a scholar and membership in the Quraysh tribe, which would make him a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, traditionally a criterion for being a caliph.
“There may be others who have at least the last of these,” Wood said, “but no one will combine all of them.”