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“The enemy has tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate back into the east of the city and has indiscriminately fired mortars, rockets and artillery into liberated areas on more than 300 occasions in the last week.” Jones said, “with characteristic disdain for human life.” The 16th Iraqi Army Division supported by police and thousands of tribal forces moved into the east side of the city, the general said, to provide security to the population and keep the enemy from reinfiltrating or using sleeper cells. Between now and then we live in a dangerous time,” Wainwright said.In Iraq, the Iraqi forces continue preparing to liberate western Mosul. “I do think that in the end like all forms of terrorism, like all forms of terrorist groups, both domestic and international, they are ultimately defeated. However, Rob Wainwright, the director general of Europol, said recently that he believes ISIS is in decline. “What we’re seeing now is an unprecedented wave of terrorist attacks that are emanating from ISIS, whether they’re actually directing those attacks … inspiring those attacks, or … successfully claiming credit for people who are mentally ill and carry out violence.”Įuropean police say about 5,000 foreign fighters have answered the ISIS call to go fight in Iraq and Syria, and now about a third of those people have returned to Europe. “When they face that, we will see a new mutation.”īerger says it is too early to be optimistic about the defeat of ISIS as a network, which is quick to claim responsibility for all kinds of violent attacks. “We’ve seen that ISIS itself is really a mutation that was born out of intense pressure and near-defeat” in the wake of the Iraq War.
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The followers of ISIS are extremists, which means that many of them will not be easily dissuaded by facts on the ground, Berger says. But I don’t think it’s going to end them.” “It will be harder for them to mount that claim. “A lot of their initial success and propaganda was based on a narrative that they were a very successful group, that they were holding this territory, that they had done things that nobody else had ever done,” Berger says.
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“It takes a lot of air out of the balloon. Instead of calling followers from the West to the caliphate, it's now asking them to stay put and carry out terrorist attacks where they are, no matter how small.ĭoes its shrinking "state" undermine the legitimacy of ISIS? He’s a co-author of “ ISIS: The State of Terror.”īut the group’s propaganda has shifted. ISIS is not giving up on state-building either, says J.M. “Losing 25 percent or 40 percent of their ‘state’ doesn’t mean that they lose 25 or 40 percent of their capabilities to carry out attacks abroad,” he adds. “It was an extraordinarily bloody month, with multiple terrorist attacks across at least 10 different countries across the globe that were claimed in the name of ISIS,” Gartenstein-Ross says. The terrorism campaign launched during this past holy month of Ramadan is a case in point. “That being said, as they lose ground, they need to show that they’re still strong,” he says. ISIS was never just about state-building, says Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “And would we be defeated and you be victorious if you were to take Mosul or Sirte or Raqqa or even take all the cities and we were to return to our initial condition? Certainly not!” Adnani added.īack in 2014, after its fighters shocked the world by seizing vast territories in Iraq and Syria, the messengers from ISIS made a pitch to young Muslims that went something like this: Come join the caliphate of the prophecy! Be part of history by helping to build the Islamic state described in the Quran. “Do you, O America, consider defeat to be the loss of a city or the loss of land?” In a statement released in May, Adnani warned the enemies of ISIS, “O America! Listen, O Crusaders! Listen, O Jews!” The Islamic State group is losing ground, and its leaders know it.Ību Mohammad al-Adnani, the official spokesman for ISIS, has come pretty close to acknowledging that the territory controlled by the group is slipping away.