It is only February, and already, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) has had a rough year. ISIS’s supporters quickly went from cheering on a large prison break in northeast Syria to learning, days later, that the group’s reclusive leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, was killed in a daring U.S. special operations raid.
Before Qurayshi’s death, there was growing concern that ISIS might be resurgent. Beyond the prison break in Syria, where ISIS fighters had managed to maintain control of the facility for several days despite a powerful military assault by U.S. and Kurdish-led forces, there were other troubling signs of the group’s vitality. A February report from the UN Security Council sanctions monitoring team expressed alarm at ISIS’s growing power in various central African provinces and its resurgence in Afghanistan now that U.S. troops are gone. In Iraq and Syria, even though ISIS has been conducting fewer guerrilla activities, there are still stark political and sectarian divisions, rural areas stressed by climate change, and post-pandemic economic difficulties—all of which could fuel an ISIS comeback.
