In recent days, several news reports have emerged about the Islamic State, the jihadist organization also often referred to as ISIS or Daesh, which should serve as a general warning. From the probable link to the perpetrators of the anti-Semitic attack on Bondi Beach, in Sydney, to the attack that killed three Americans in Syria, reality shows that the group is not defeated, despite the elimination of successive leaders, such as in 2019 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Iraqi who came to proclaim himself caliph, and the loss of the territories he conquered in Syria and Iraq. During much of the 2010s, we must not forget, the Islamic State was able to assume itself as a territorial reality, taking advantage of the fact that the government in Damascus was facing a civil war and that in Baghdad was divided into factional struggles and weakened by years of terrorism.
The loss of Raqqa, in Syria, and above all of Mosul, a city with one million inhabitants and the second largest in Iraq, which between 2014 and 2017 was controlled by the jihadists, showed the group’s inability to fight against a vast international coalition (including the United States), the governments of the Middle East (such as Iraq from a certain point onwards)” and even the peshmergas (fighters from the Syrian, Iraqi and Turkish Kurdish separatist movements). Thousands of jihadists and their families then surrendered, with different fates, from those executed to those who spent long periods in prison camps, to those repatriated, several from Europe.
The declaration of an Islamic State, trying to do justice to the group’s name, showed an essential difference to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda, despite the many ideological coincidences, namely an obscurantist vision of Islam, fury against Shiites and other Islamic minorities, persecution of Christians and Jews, and hatred of the so-called Western Civilization. Don’t forget that although Al-Qaeda was founded to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, it ended up turning against the United States and, under the leadership of Saudi Bin Laden, organizing the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York. And the Islamic State itself arises from Al-Qaeda in Iraq, an armed uprising after the Americans invaded Saddam Hussein’s country and overthrew the regime.
To a certain extent, the military capacity of the Islamic State resulted from the alliance of convenience between former officers of Saddam’s Armed Forces, a secular leader, with the Islamists, in the name of Sunni solidarity (and survival) in the face of pro-Shiite regimes, such as the new one in Baghdad, or that of the Assad dynasty, in Damascus.
Today, without a territorial base, although taking advantage of the fragility of the new Syria of Ahmed Al-Sharaa, a former jihadist converted into a statesman, the Islamic State is trying to resurface through associated groups and cells dispersed all over the world. Terrible attacks in Western Europe a decade ago, such as the Bataclan in Paris, still remain in memory, but from Sri Lanka to Russia, jihadists have continued to kill. Whether in Nigeria, where it inspires a dissident faction of Boko Haram, or in Afghanistan, where the Islamic State – Khorasan Province challenges the Taliban regime, the action is constant and deadly, sometimes combining the global jihadist agenda with internal issues.
There are those who say that the jihadist threat was greatly inflated because of the spectacularity, and death, of September 11th. That with the War on Terror, and interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States distracted itself from competition with the other great powers, not paying due attention to the geopolitical resurgence of Russia and, above all, the brilliant rise of China. But both the destructive capacity of Al-Qaeda, even after the death of Bin Laden and his Egyptian successor Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the murderous history of the Islamic State, advise that we not forget the jihadist threat, which shows recruitment capacity, the ability to attract allies and the ability to act in different geographies. It threatens the West, Russia, China and the Islamic world itself, as jihadist organizations do not shy away from attacking in Muslim-majority countries. Consider the operation that Turkey had to launch against the Islamic State to prevent attacks this festive season, especially in Istanbul, which has been the target of terrorist attacks on other occasions.
Deputy Director of Diário de Notícias