ISIS caliphate collapsed in the Middle East, its survivors formed sleeper cells in its former Syrian strongholds of Raqqa and Palmyra, and in smaller urban centres such as al-Bab. Each cell consists of safe places for obscure leaders, a mailbox for messengers, storage for weapons and ammunition and a war chest. The total ISIS war chest is calculated at $25 million. Between 2014 and 2019, the group was fascinated with its mission to create a state.
Today it is battling to survive. It collects funds by force, holds merchants for ransom and kills people who get in the way. Its soldiers attack jails in northern Syria to free experienced fighters.
ISIS has established itself in the territory because of impoverishment and insecurity. Many fighters have been gone and others arrested. One of them admitted that he had been promised a monthly compensation of $400, a substantial amount in Syria, to perpetrate acts of violence.
Once concentrated around a leader and a Shura Council, ISIS now looks like a wasted organization. International counterterrorism parties have taken out its head four times and now the leadership structure labouring to revive itself. The most recent leader, Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Quraishi, is or was a mystery.
What exists now may be collaborative leadership rather than reliance on a single leader. Such an organizational model would aim to evade anti-terrorist strikes while transmitting a message of resilience to the fighting base. This is a win for the counter-terrorism forces, which have succeeded in structurally draining the group and establishing the concept that any activist who rises to a position of commitment will sooner or later be eliminated.
The organization supports the appearance of a pyramidal form. Arrests have enabled the designation of several functions: head of the sector, director of intelligence, head of a sleeper cell, head of a training centre, planner of attacks, logistics leader, messenger, information office operator and fighters.
The United Nations has conveyed a decline in ISIS attacks in Syria, an assessment authorised by the Global Coalition Against Daesh, which has registered a 55 per cent drop in operations in 2022. While these figures show an undeniable reality, it is important to emphasise that they do not include failed or aborted operations nor the small-scale brutality that takes place daily in the triangle of Palmyra-Deir Ezzor-Abu Kamal, where physical threats, thefts, kidnappings, assassinations and the planting of spontaneous explosive devices (IEDs) are common.
Combining large-scale aggression with neighbourhood harassment is likely meaningful of a disjointed chain of control, between a leadership plagued with large-scale warfare and autonomous cells operating their small businesses through a mixture of gangsterism and theological tinkering.
Russia and the United States are operating counterterrorism operations in the Syrian Desert, the U.S. forces being by far the most dynamic. They work tirelessly to destroy the organization’s critical operatives like Hudhayfah al-Yamani, an operations planner, or, more recently, Mahmoud al-Hajj, director of intelligence and recruitment. These men, who are considered to be experienced in secret life, made serious security errors that permitted them to be traced. The head of ISIS’s Iraqi branch, Abu Sarah al-Iraqi, was annihilated in February, demonstrating once again the defeat of the security services to protect their leaders.
