ISISISIS prepares followers for end of caliphate

In the face of an ever-more-effective campaign by the U.S.-led coalition — a campaign which has substantialy reduced the size of the ISIS-controlled areas in Iraq and Syria; decimated ISIS’s oil-production and distribution infrastructure; killed many senior commanders and operatives; and, with the help of Turkey, choked off the flow of foreign fighters to replenish the organization’s dwindling ranks – ISIS leaders have begun to prepare followers of the Islamist organization for the fall of the ISIS-established caliphate.

Fox News reports that ISIS has increased its terror attacks in other countries, but that in Syria and Iraq its position is rapidly deteriorating. Security experts note that the latest spate of terrorist attacks shows that even if ISIS is defeated in Iraq and Syria, the organization will still remain dangerous abroad.

“Where Al Qaeda was hierarchical and somewhat controlled, these guys are not. They have all the energy and unpredictability of a populist movement,” Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden (Ret.) told the Washington Post.

ISIS officials have not minced words in describing the dire situation the organization faces in Iraq and Syria, grimly informing ISIS fighters that all could be lost soon. The Post reports notes that an editorial in ISIS’s weekly Arabic newsletter acknowledged that the territory it has controlled for two years could be lost.

ISIS officials insist that, in the long run, the organization’s vision of a, Islamic caliphate across the Middle East is still viable, even if, in the short run, the caliphate experiment may fail. The organization’s leaders also note that faced with the prospect of losing their territorial base in the Middle East, the group had “shifted some of our command, media and wealth structure to different countries.”

“They don’t want to lose territory,” Cole Bunzel, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University’s Near Eastern studies department who translated ISIS’s editorial on the future of the caliphate, told the Post. “But they’re trying to remind people that the group has a long history and they’re going to persist, just as they did in earlier times.”

Will McCants, a Brookings Institution researcher who also detailed the history of ISIS in a 2015 book (The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State), says that ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani has acknowledged that the group had made errors in its losses. According to the Post, an ISIS operative told a Western journalist that some of the Islamist militants had become disillusioned because of commanders’ mistakes. However, he added that once Raqqa falls, it would be avenged.

“There is a message to all members of the coalition against us: We will not forget, and we will come into your countries and hit you,” he said, “one way or the other.”

ISIS leaders have not yet offered specifics about the organization’s post-caliphate strategy, but European officials say that this strategy is already being implemented.

“They are … challenged as we adapt our strategy to their initial one, in order to start ‘de-sanctuarizing’ them,” a French security official told the Post. “But they will now expand to other tactics and start executing much more insidious and covert ops, in big cities. The next step, has begun.”