Islamic State resurgence follows US foreign policy

Eliyahu Tulshinski

November 22, 2023

Recently released photos from the Philippines reveal armed Islamic State (IS or ISIS) members pledging Bay'ah — an Islamic term for an oath of allegiance — to the new caliph (leader) of the Islamic State.

The reach of ISIS far beyond the Middle East is an extraordinary development in the history of the movement.

Growing caliphate

The predecessor to ISIS, Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (The Organisation of Monotheism and Jihad), was formed in 1999 with the “goal of overthrowing the government of Jordan for not conforming with [its founder's] extremist Sunni view of Islam,” according to Time Magazine.

It remained a small group until the Iraq War, changing its name to al-Qaeda in Iraq before morphing eventually into ISIS during the Obama administration:

The group hatched various plots in the following years, but it wasn’t until the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq that [the] group gained real traction. The U.S. invasion destabilized the country and allowed the group to grow.

Al-Zarqawi pledged allegiance to Osama Bin Laden and changed the name of the group to al-Qaeda in Iraq. . . . after taking power in 2011, [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi cut off ties with al-Qaeda and changed the name of the group to the Islamic State in Iraq. He targeted Shiites and planned to unite the Arab world under a single Sunni regime. In 2013, he changed the group’s name to the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) to reflect the expanded ambition . . . [Emphases added].

The movement received so much support from Barack Obama that President Trump credited him and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as ISIS co-founders.

Breitbart reported that Trump's statement was literally true and not just a reference to a vacuum of power in the Middle East, created by Obama, that assisted the rise of ISIS:

Conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt tried to give Mr. Trump an out. “I know what you meant,” he suggested. “You meant that he [Obama] created the vacuum, he lost the peace.”

“No,” Trump replied. “I meant, he’s the founder of ISIS. I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton.”

Trump is correct – and quite literally, so. . . .

Thanks to Judicial Watch, we now have an August 2012 defense intelligence report on the civil war in Syria and the situation in Iraq that openly states that the policy of the United States and its allies was to support the Salafist opposition to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

That opposition, at the time spearheaded by Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), soon morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, ISIS. [Emphases added].

General Michael Flynn publicly commented on Obama's arming the insurgent group:

With this support, ISIS grew into a 34,000 square mile caliphate and expanded beyond Syria and Iraq to Africa and Asia.

Disappearing caliphate

As quickly as ISIS grew, it collapsed with greater speed, virtually disappearing in just four years.

In the first three years of Trump's presidency, ISIS was reduced to a mere desert pocket of just a few hundred square meters, as detailed by the BBC:

At its height, IS [i.e., ISIS] controlled 88,000 sq km (34,000 sq miles) of land stretching across Syria and Iraq.

After five years of fierce battles, though, local forces backed by world powers left IS with all but a few hundred square metres near Syria's border with Iraq.

On Saturday, the White House released a statement in which President Trump described IS's loss of territory as "evidence of its false narrative", adding: "They have lost all prestige and power." [Emphases added].

The collapse resulted from specific policy changes authorized by Trump, doing away with Obama's restrictive "rules of engagement," rules that have been credited with preventing a U.S. victory in Vietnam:

Trump said during his campaign that, if elected, he would convene his "top generals and give them a simple instruction. They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS."

Once in office, Trump made several changes in the way the war was fought, the most important of which were to loosen the rules of engagement and give more decision-making authority to battlefield commanders.

Joshua Keating, writing in the liberal commentary site Slate, noted that Trump had "instructed the Pentagon to loosen the rules of engagement for airstrikes to the minimum required by international law, eliminated White House oversight procedures meant to protect civilians, and ordered the CIA to resume covert targeted killing missions." (He meant it as a criticism.)

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who can hardly be called a Trump lap dog, praised what he said was "a dramatic shift in a very positive way — away from the political micromanaging of the Obama years to freeing up generals and troops to destroy ISIS."

The result of this shift seems pretty obvious. In July, ISIS was booted from Mosul, and this week Raqqa was liberated. For all intents and purposes, ISIS has been defeated. Trump did in nine months what Obama couldn't in the previous three years. [Emphases added].

Trump's battle plans culminated in the assassination of the group's founder, which he stated was a top priority from day one of his administration:

“Last night, the United States brought the world’s number one terrorist leader to justice,” Trump said. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead. He was the founder and leader of ISIS, the most ruthless and violent terror organization anywhere in the world.”

Trump said that al-Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest as he was trapped in a tunnel with his three children as American forces approached. “He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way,” Trump said. . . .

Trump said that he was adamant about finding al-Baghdadi as soon as he took office as president. “Capturing or killing Baghdadi has been the top national security priority of my administration,” he said.

Seeds for growth

Trump has been blamed, though, for leaving ISIS with the potential to regroup by abandoning America's Kurdish allies in the war against ISIS. Trump ordered a rushed pullout of U.S. troops from the region, leaving some 11,000 ISIS members insufficiently guarded in prisons as many Kurds fled for their lives from Turkish troops that advanced on them following America's removal of forces:

The United Nations announced . . . that 130,000 Kurds have evacuated their homes as a result of the invasion, nothing [sic] that the number stands to rise as Turkey continues its assault. . . . 60 civilians and more than 200 fighters . . . have been killed as a result of the offensive.

Back to Obama rules

Upon assuming office, Biden restored Obama's policy requiring the U.S. military to follow strict "rules of engagement," as seen in a raid on its leader at the time, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi:

Biden said he ordered U.S. forces to “take every precaution available to minimize civilian casualties,” the reason they did not conduct an airstrike on the home."

The New York Times noted the danger these rules posed to U.S. troops, who had to stay on the ground outside the building where al-Qurayshi was located after warning the occupants of the upcoming raid:

It was also reported that, "Mr. Biden said he “made a choice to pursue a Special Forces raid at a much greater risk to our own people,” rather than to order an airstrike that would have destroyed the entire building."

In contrast, the New York Times describes the greater freedom the military had when it was successfully defeating ISIS, presumably in the Trump years:

At the height of the air war against the Islamic State in Syria, the military had specific, classified guidelines, known as “noncombatant causality values,” that allowed a certain number of civilians to be killed in pursuit of high-value enemy targets.

Special Operations forces repeatedly used large bombs against relatively low-value targets, killing people who were not in the fight.

Comeback

Building off the seeds left by Trump and tightened rules of engagement issued by Biden, ISIS began recovering from Trump-era losses almost immediately upon Biden's inauguration:

“The evidence of a resurgence of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is mounting by the day, nearly three years after the militants lost the last patch of territory of their so-called caliphate, which once stretched across vast parts of the two countries,” the [New York] Times reported.

By 2021, the attacks against Iraqi security forces and citizens from the “stragglers” of the Islamic State group became more frequent and problematic.

“. . . 995 attacks recorded [were] nationwide between 1 January and 20 October 2021 . . . ” political scientist Hardy Mède told Le Monde Diplomatique in December of 2021. “ISIS may now be capable of taking a city. This is a new phase: it’s shifting from targeted attacks to territorial control.” [Emphases added].

Since then, ISIS has built up to the point where it is regularly carrying out deadly attacks in the Middle East, taking over 500 lives since the beginning of 2023 alone. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is now reporting near daily lethal attacks by ISIS, including a headline yesterday announcing, “New attack by “ISIS” | Four members of Iranian-backed militias killed.”

The Biden administration concedes that ISIS poses a threat, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitting, “for all our progress, the fight is not yet done.” Blinken's wording, though, gives the impression that progress has been made throughout the Biden administration, as if ISIS were growing steadily weaker in this period, and not enjoying a resurgence:

Beyond the Middle East

Biden administration policies have enabled the destruction of law and order affecting not only the Middle East; ISIS is acting worldwide, as seen in the above tweet from the Philippines and in their global planning described by Voice of America:

U.S. officials tasked with tracking Islamic State are seeing worrisome signs that the terror group’s core leadership is strengthening control over its global network of affiliates despite a series of key losses.

Specifically, the United States is raising concerns about the group’s General Directorate of Provinces, a series of nine regional offices set up over the past several years to sustain the group’s reputation and global capabilities. [Emphases added].

Revolutionary goals

ISIS has grown, under Biden, to the point that DW posted a headline entitled, "Syria's Ticking Time Bomb - The Kurds, Turkey and ISIS; Is the world facing a resurgence of the so-called Islamic State (IS)?"

Iran's Shiite leadership opposes the Sunni led ISIS. It is, however, the Iranian regime's goals of promoting revolution throughout the West that would be most advanced by the global chaos ISIS again threatens to create.

See our additional Middle East coverage: