Since the loss of its caliphate in 2018, after an intense four-year US-led air war, ISIS paramilitaries in Iraq and Syria have been relatively quiet. That is hardly surprising given the intensity of the West’s Operation Inherent Resolve, which involved 30,000 air attacks and 100,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles, killing at least 60,000 ISIS supporters, as well as thousands of civilians.
What is surprising, however, is how extreme Islamist paramilitaries, many of whom are loosely linked to ISIS or al-Qaida, have since thrived across the Sahel and North Africa, as well as down to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique and across into Afghanistan. Even in Syria and Iraq, ISIS has far from disappeared, with frequent attacks on security forces and on Shi’a communities. Now, with the violence of the past three weeks – including a massacre of Iraqi army soldiers, a huge prison break in Syria and the killing of ISIS’s current leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi – the question is being raised, is ISIS heading for a third wave of violence?
To get a handle on this, we need to recall how the first two waves came about. The first was in the form of al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) following the US-led invasion in 2003. Under the leadership of the brutal but effective Jordanian, Abdul Musab al-Zarqawi, AQI was for years at the core of anti-Western violence in the region. The group was eventually suppressed in 2010-11 by a highly organised multi-year operation by US and British special forces, which centred on hundreds of well-resourced night raids and intensive interrogation and torture, including prisoners held in the notorious ‘dog kennels’ at Balad Air Force Base.
