by Joby Warrick and Souad Mekhennet, July 13, 2016.

(Uncredited/AP)

Even as it launches waves of terrorist attacks around the globe, the
Islamic State is quietly preparing its followers for the eventual
collapse of the caliphate it proclaimed with great fanfare two years
ago. 

In public messages and in recent actions in Syria, the
group’s leaders are acknowledging the terrorist organization’s declining
fortunes on the battlefield while bracing for the possibility that its
remaining strongholds could fall.
At the same time, the group is
vowing to press on with its recent campaign of violence, even if the
terrorists themselves are driven underground. U.S. counterterrorism
experts believe the mass­casualty attacks in Istanbul and Baghdad in the
past month were largely a response to military reversals in Iraq and
Syria.

Such terrorist acts are likely to continue and even
intensify, at least initially, analysts say, as the group evolves from a
quasi-state with territorial holdings to a shadowy and diffuse network
with branches and cells on at least three continents.
Indeed,
while the loss of a physical sanctuary would constitute a major blow to
the Islamic State — severely limiting, for example, its ability to raise
money, train recruits or plan complex terrorist operations — the
group’s highly decentralized nature ensures that it will remain
dangerous for some time to come, according to current and former U.S.
officials and terrorism experts.

“Where al-Qaeda was
hierarchical and somewhat controlled, these guys are not. They have all
the energy and unpredictability of a populist movement,” said Michael
Hayden, the retired Air Force general who headed the CIA from 2006 to
2009.

Islamic State officials, in public statements and in interviews,
insist that the group’s “caliphate” project remains viable while also
acknowledging that military setbacks have forced a change in strategy.

“While
we see our core structure in Iraq and Syria under attack, we have been
able to expand and have shifted some of our command, media and wealth
structure to different countries,” a longtime Islamic State operative,
speaking through an Internet-based audio service, said in an interview.

“We
do have, every day, people reaching out and telling us they want to
come to the caliphate,” said the operative, who agreed to speak to a
Western journalist on the condition that his name and physical location
not be revealed. 
“But we tell them to stay in their countries and rather
wait to do something there.”

But signs of desperation are
mounting weekly inside the caliphate, which shrank by another 12 percent
in the first six months of 2016, according to a report last week by IHS
Inc., an analysis and consulting firm.
A series of
communiques issued in the Islamic State’s Syrian enclave last month
closed down Internet cafes in one province and ordered the destruction
of TVs and satellite dishes in another.

The orders,
billed as an effort to eliminate a tool for “disseminating infidel
beliefs,” effectively cut off access to news from the outside world.

More
signals of a coming downfall are contained in statements issued by
Islamic State officials over the past six weeks, a period that saw the
group’s fighters retreating across multiple fronts, from Fallujah in
central Iraq to the Syrian-Turkish border.
A remarkable editorial
last month in al-Naba, the Islamic State’s weekly Arabic newsletter,
offered a gloomy assessment of the caliphate’s prospects, acknowledging
the possibility that all its territorial holdings could ultimately be
lost. Just two years ago, jihadist leaders heralded the start of a
glorious new epoch in the world’s history with the establishment of
their Islamic “caliphate,” which at the time encompassed most of eastern
Syria and a vast swath of northern and western Iraq, a combined
territory roughly the size of Great Britain.

The editorial, titled, “The Crusaders’ Illusions in the Age of the
Caliphate,” sought to rally the group’s followers by insisting that the
Islamic State would continue to survive, even if all its cities fell to
the advancing “crusaders” — the separate Western- and Russian-backed
forces arrayed against them.

“The crusaders and their apostate
clients are under the illusion that . . . they will be able to eliminate
all of the Islamic State’s provinces at once, such that it will be
completely wiped out and no trace of it will be left,” the article
states. In reality, the group’s foes “will not be able to eliminate it
by destroying one of its cities or besieging another of them, or by
killing a soldier, an emir or an imam,” it says.

The editorial
asserts that the “whole world­ . . . has changed” with the creation of a
theocratic enclave that has “shown all of mankind what the true Islamic
state is like.”

“If they want to achieve true victory — they
will not, God willing — they will have to wait a long time: until an
entire generation of Muslims that was witness to the establishment of
the Islamic State and the return of the caliphate . . . is wiped out.”

The
same themes were repeated in an otherwise upbeat sermon by the Islamic
State’s official spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, marking the start of
Ramadan observances. Adnani’s missive attracted international attention
because of its call for a global terrorism campaign during the Muslim
holy month. But Adnani also appeared to be preparing his followers for
heavy losses.
At one point he evoked one of the darkest chapters
in the Islamic State’s history, when the group — then known as the
Islamic State of Iraq — was all but destroyed in 2008 by a combination
of forces, including the U.S. troop surge and the “Anbar Awakening,” a
revolt against the Islamists by Sunni Arab tribes.

“Were we
defeated when we lost the cities in Iraq and were in the desert without
any city or land? And would we be defeated and you be victorious if you
were to take Mosul, Sirte or Raqqa, or even take all the cities?” asked
Adnani, referring to the Islamic State’s primary strongholds in Iraq,
Libya and Syria. “Certainly not!”

The
group’s near-defeat in 2008 also has been cited multiple times in
recent weeks in social-media accounts, suggesting to some analysts that
its leaders are trying to limit the inevitable damage to the Islamic
State’s reputation among jihadists as an unstoppable military and moral
force.
“They don’t want to lose territory,” said Cole Bunzel, a doctoral
candidate at Princeton University’s Near Eastern studies department who
provided a translation and commentary on
the al-Naba editorial in the blog Jihadica. “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.”

The deadly attacks
against Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport and Baghdad’s Karrada shopping
district — both relatively easy targets for terrorists concerned only
with massive numbers of civilian casualties — were probably also part of
the same effort to reassure followers of the Islamic State’s vitality,
said Will McCants, a Brookings Institution researcher and author of the
2015 book “ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State.”

“The
successful attacks abroad are an indication of deep worry at home,”
McCants said. After years of boasting of the group’s invincibility,
leaders such as Adnani are beginning to acknowledge battlefield losses
while attempting to depict them in the most positive light, he said.
Absent from the group’s statements is any acknowledgment of strategic
and tactical errors that contributed to the Islamic State’s current
predicament, fighting alone against a broad array of forces that
includes the major Western powers, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Russians
and Kurds, McCants said.

“They’re not trying to be clever about
it,” he said, “but they’re really trying to prepare their followers to
cope with a ‘caliphate’ that is no longer a caliphate.”

The
Islamic State operative who consented to an interview acknowledged that
some of the group’s followers had become disillusioned because of
mistakes by individual commanders. He said he didn’t care whether the
organization’s headquarters remained in Raqqa or moved to North Africa
or elsewhere — although he added that the loss of Raqqa would certainly
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.”

European intelligence
officials fear that the new phase is already underway. “They are . . .
challenged as we adapt our strategy to their initial one, in order to
start ‘de-sanctuarizing’ them,” said a senior French security official,
speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss counterterrorism
strategy. “But they will now expand to other tactics and start executing
much more insidious and covert ops, in big cities.

“The next step,” he said, “has begun.”

SOURCE: Washington post