Indications that the Islamic State (ISIS) has begun to employ artificial intelligence in its efforts to recruit new fighters should come as no surprise. At the height of its power a decade ago, Isis was characterized by its combination of having mastered the latest methods of communication with an ideology and praxis that seemed to have emerged wholesale from the deserts of 7th century Arabia.
In 2014 and 2015, ISIS recruitment took place on Twitter and Facebook. YouTube was the favored platform for the dissemination of propaganda. The group’s videoclips of its barbaric prisoner executions, including the beheadings of a series of western journalists and aid workers and the immolation of a captured Jordanian pilot, became the organization’s gruesome trademark.
When the self-declared ISIS “caliphate” stretched across an area of Iraq and Syria roughly the size of Great Britain, these modes of communication and propaganda drew thousands of young Muslims from across the West and the Arab world to enlist under the terror group’s distinctive black banners. Current indications suggest that in an atmosphere of renewed relevance for political Islam, the organization is stirring.
Islamic State never really went away, of course, though it has faded from the headlines over the last turbulent half decade. The caliphate’s final holdings were retaken by US-led coalition forces in the Baghuz area of the lower Euphrates river valley in the summer of 2019. ISIS fighters were transferred to the archipelago of prisons maintained by the US-aligned Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Their wives and families went to the sprawling al-Hol and Roj encampments, maintained until now by the same organization.
But far from the centers of power, Islamic State has maintained in the intervening years a kind of “ghost caliphate” on the lands it once held, as well as beyond. Support networks, hiding places, weapons supplies and the relationships with tribes and clans which alone make possible safe passage across the remote areas and deserts of Syria and Iraq have all been maintained.
In places with names not widely known or noticed in the West, ISIS has maintained fighters and infrastructure. The Karachok mountain chain in Iraq, with its remote caves ideal for hiding and storing food, water and weapons; the poverty-stricken lower Deir al Zur province in Syria; and the vast Badia desert in central Syria are but a few.
In the Roj and especially the al-Hol camps in Syria, meanwhile, a new generation of ISIS fighters is being educated. Many of the residents of these facilities are simply displaced refugees. But a hardcore group of ISIS families dominate. There are 38,000 residents of these camps, along with 9,000 ISIS fighters in the SDF’s jails.
Visiting al-Hol in mid 2024, I encountered a reality in which the under-resourced, western supported SDF personnel merely guarded the perimeters of the large tent encampments which comprise the camp. Within, Islamic State was in control. The organization was educating and indoctrinating its young. It was maintaining its own system of “justice,” up to and including passing death sentences, which were then carried out, the corpses left for the authorities to collect outside the compound. Escapes were also frequent and often involved bribing the guards.
The usual destination of the escapees was of particular note. At that time, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which now rules Syria, was in control of only a small enclave in the northwest of the country. HTS was not an ally of ISIS, and in fact suppressed the organization in its area of control. But it emerged from the same Sunni jihadi origins. ISIS men knew that if they could reach the HTS-controlled enclave, they would be left alone as long as they did not seek to organize against the de facto authorities in the area. Escapees headed in this direction.
The collapse of the Assad regime late last year left a security vacuum in Syria, at least outside of the 30 percent of the country controlled by the SDF. HTS commanded less than 40,000 fighters when it took Damascus. In the first months of its rule, its grip on the more remote parts of Syria was nonexistent.
Driving across the Badia in January this year, I found the checkpoints of the former regime deserted. Nothing had come to replace them yet. Lacking manpower, the new government has concentrated on securing the vital urban centers. ISIS has been quick to take advantage of the vacuum. The organization is reckoned to have around 2,500 fighters now in Syria and Iraq. A sharp uptick in attacks has taken place in the course of the year. Weapons have been stockpiled in the vast and still largely unsecured Badia. Recruitment is taking place in the poorest tribal areas where Islamic State and al-Qaeda have traditionally flourished. An ISIS insurgency is now a solid possibility.
The lingering appeal of ISIS as an idea in the Islamic world should not be dismissed. What exactly is this idea? One of the group’s fighters who I interviewed in the Turkish border town of Cielis in 2014 expressed it to me succinctly: “We want the caliphate, something old and new, from the time of Mohammed. The Europeans created false borders. We want to break these borders.”
These ideas did not die with the fall of Baghuz in 2019. The last couple of years have been good ones for Sunni Islamism in the Middle East. The Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent Gaza war returned Islamist insurgency to center stage. The issue of the Palestinians and Israel retains a matchless intensity of appeal for masses of young people across the Islamic world. HTS’s march into Damascus, a byproduct of Israel’s weakening of Hezbollah and Iran, further reinforces the newly returned relevance of Sunni political Islam.
ISIS emerged from this milieu. In April, visiting al-Hol again, I was told that the ISIS compounds joyfully celebrated the march of HTS into Damascus. They told their Kurdish jailers that their roles would soon be reversed.
There is a crucial point here to be borne in mind. The government of HTS and President Ahmed al-Sharaa, following the latter’s recent visit to Washington, are now members of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS group. But while they have clashed in the past, ISIS and HTS come from the same root. There has been much migration of fighters between the two groups. Just this week, government-linked fighters who clashed with the SDF in Raqqa province were photographed wearing patches resembling the black ISIS banner.
Can HTS forces be relied upon to suppress the terror group’s re-emerging strength in Syria? And if the Damascus authorities attempt to move against Islamic State, will the government’s own fighters, many of them Sunni jihadis of a similar mindset to ISIS, remain loyal? These questions remain to be answered.
ISIS’s revival is not confined to Syria alone. The organization’s Afghan “province” carried out large-scale and deadly operations in Moscow and Iran last year. A series of attempts have been thwarted in Europe. Jihad al-Shamie, who carried out the murderous terror attack at the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester in October, claimed allegiance to Islamic State in his phone call to police. In short, Islamic State is returning. It is making use of the full variety of recruitment and operational tools available to it. Vigilance at the security level and coherent policymaking at the political level will be equally vital in meeting its challenge.
