(C) OpenDemocracy
This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Why ISIS is likely to become Trump’s biggest foreign challenge [1]
[]
Date: 2025-05
While the world’s media is focused on whether the Gaza ceasefire will succeed, another development in the region is receiving very little attention: the strength and potential of ISIS, after nearly a decade of apparent marginalisation.
Back in 2018, at the end of the intense US-led air war in Syria, staff from the US’s Special Operations Command staff reported that ISIS had taken huge casualties, losing as many as 60,000 of its supporters, leading directly to the collapse of the caliphate.
Then the group appeared to suddenly come back from nowhere at the start of 2025. A US army veteran, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, killed 14 people in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day, claiming to have joined ISIS. Though the organisation later avoided claiming responsibility for the attack (while still praising Jabbar for carrying it out), military bases across the US were put on alert for possible further attacks.
While the New Orleans massacre did return some attention to the wider movement, the slow reforming of ISIS as an Islamist movement of substantial potential has been happening for many months and quite possibly years.
Get our free Daily Email Get one whole story, direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up now
Indeed, ISIS’s re-emergence is one of the main reasons the US has maintained around 3,500 troops and many more civilian contractors in Iraq and Syria, the group’s power showing in attacks on US troops.
ISIS also maintains influence and connections with Islamist paramilitary movements across the Sahel and even down the East Africa coast to northern Mozambique, but its main centre of strength is still in the heart of the Middle East, with small groups of fighters operating in northern Syria and Iraq.
It is telling that in the week of the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria last month, US Central Command staged repeated airstrikes against 75 presumed ISIS targets in Syria, including with B-52 strategic heavy bombers. Just last week, the newly reformed post-Assad Syrian intelligence organisation was reported to have disrupted an ISIS attempt to bomb a Shi’a shrine in Sayyida Zeinab, a suburb of Damascus that had been targeted in the past.
ISIS’s attacks on US troops in recent months are not minor inconveniences, and there has been a notable upsurge in the number carried out since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023. In November, the Pentagon reported there had been 79 attacks in Iraq and 129 in Syria since then.
Just last week, US defence secretary Lloyd Austin stated that US soldiers would be staying in Syria in the long term, with a source suggesting the number of troops in the region had recently doubled, taking the combined US total for Iraq and Syria to around 4,500, including the reinforced 101st airborne brigade, which has up to 2,000 troops designed to move rapidly to counter ISIS actions.
The problem for US forces in the region is that ISIS does not just have isolated groups of supporters but some large and committed concentrations. When the caliphate finally collapsed in 2018, many ISIS paramilitaries dispersed across Syria and Iraq and today they form the basis of current active fighters.
Far more still were taken into custody, along with their families, by Kurdish forces allied with the US. Seven years on, between 8,000 and 10,000 are still detained – including around 2,000 regarded as especially dangerous – as well as around 30,000 members of their families. The US fears tensions between Turkey and the US-backed Kurds could lead to their release.
In the wake of the collapse of the Assad regime, five countries are competing for influence: Russia, Iran, the US, Israel and Turkey. The latter has been backing one of Syria’s armed groups, the Syrian National Army, using it to put huge pressure on the Kurdish-controlled part of northern Syria, commonly known as Rojava, which is a place of relative calm and order in the country. The Kurds, meanwhile, have two powerful paramilitary groups, the People’s Protection Units and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, as I outlined in a recent column.
These Turkish-backed forces and the Kurds have been involved in sustained fighting over the strategically important Tishrin Dam on the Euphrates River. The concern of informed US State Department analysts is that the Kurdish forces opposing Turkey will become so pressurised that they will not also be able to maintain the prison camps housing those many thousands of ISIS followers, enabling them to disperse and then do much to speed up the whole process of an ISIS new age.
During his first term in the White House, Donald Trump made much of his claim that he had reduced US involvement in “foreign wars”. That may have been a bold claim and certainly not supported by the chaos in Afghanistan, but the signs are that he will push that line even more the second time around.
The focus of the Trump White House may well be on Israel and Gaza, but given what is unfolding in Syria his first major foreign military challenge may turn out to be ISIS, not Hamas.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/trump-isis-biggest-foreign-military-challenge-syria-us-iraq/
Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/
