Data on Islamic State Attacks Could be Masking Growing Problem, Some Fear

attacks so far this month. 

Year-on-year, though, attacks are down — 330 attacks so far this year compared with 776 for the same period in 2019. 

U.S. Assessment: IS Operating on the Margins 
At the same time, ongoing U.S. assessments continue to classify IS’s efforts in Iraq and Syria as a “low-level insurgency” increasingly reliant on small arms as the group appears to be unable to manufacture or acquire the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that it once favored. 

The assessments from U.S. Central Command, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S.-led coalition, shared in a report Wednesday by the Defense Department inspector general, also see IS as a group still operating mostly on the margins, both in Iraq and Syria.

In both countries, U.S. officials say IS fighters continue to prefer remote, sparsely populated areas, often with difficult terrain. 

Officials also believe IS, especially in Syria, lacks the financial resources to mount large-scale attacks. 

And even if IS has managed to increase the frequency of its attacks over the past month, U.S. defense intelligence officials contend the terror group lacks the capabilities to sustain that pace over several months. 

But there are concerns that, increasingly, the U.S.-led coalition is unable to see key changes on the ground. 

“With the consolidation of forces in both Iraq and Syria since October 2019, the DoD OIG has observed a decrease in visibility for the OIR mission,” acting Inspector General Sean O’Donnell wrote in Wednesday’s report, which also noted difficulties in getting information from U.S. partner forces. 

IS Still Formidable Threat 
Counterterrorism officials also point out there is no shortage of worrisome indicators. 

At the top of the list, they note that even after losing control of all the territory it once ruled in Iraq and Syria, IS still boasts a force ranging from 14,000 to 18,000 fighters across Iraq and Syria. 

Additionally, despite the U.S. raid that killed former IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in October of last year, IS has maintained command and control under new leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi

The group’s finances, while not what they once were, also still give IS leaders access to hundreds of millions of dollars, with new money coming in from extortion rackets, kidnappings for ransom, looting and the use of front companies. 

So, too, there is a growing possibility IS could benefit from reinforcements in the form of new recruits, both in parts of Iraq and Syria where it has maintained ties to the local populations and, perhaps, from the children of former fighters held in displaced-persons camps in Syria.  

The U.S. estimates the al-Hol camp alone has 10,000 foreign IS family members, two-thirds of them children younger than 12. Defense intelligence officials say many have held on to the IS ideology and that those with no ties to the group are constantly targeted for recruitment. 

Then there are the 10,000 IS fighters being held in makeshift prisons run by the SDF

Some non-U.S. intelligence assessments have also been more reluctant to dismiss the IS threat. 

IS “has begun to reassert itself in both the Syrian Arab Republic and Iraq, mounting increasingly bold insurgent attacks,” a United Nations report concluded this past January. 

IS Moving Uncontested in Some Areas 
There is also a question of reach, something that may be helping to skew the data. 

“Sure, attacks may be down in the areas where coalition forces operate. However, ISIS has prioritized operating at the seams and in places where coalition forces cannot readily target those ISIS cells,” said Jennifer Cafarella, research director at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. 

She said that makes IS’s increasingly sophisticated operations, like a three-pronged attack in Salahaddin, Iraq, this month that resulted in the deaths of 10 Iraqi militia members, all the more effective. 

“At what point does the will of the [local] population start to break?” Cafarella said. “We had seen renewed civilian flight away from ISIS, people picking up again and leaving their homes in parts of northeastern Iraq as early as early 2018. 

“That underlying problem hasn’t been solved and we’re actually seeing it widened now where there’s more and more areas where ISIS is moving in pretty much uncontested in any serious sense,” she said. 

Jeff Seldin is VOA news reporter. VOA Pentagon Correspondent Carla Babb contributed to this report.This article is published courtesy of the Voice of America (VOA).