Defeats in Mideast Raise ISIS Threat to the West - WSJ

Defeats in Mideast Raise ISIS Threat to the West

Wednesday March 23rd, 2016 at 6:55 PM

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BAGHDAD—When European Islamists started streaming into Syria and Iraq a few years ago, some European counterterrorism officials viewed it as a blessing in disguise. Better to have them pulverized on a Middle Eastern battlefield, they argued, than dispersed and plotting mischief at home.

Today, that battlefield has become more dangerous than ever for Islamic State, which is reeling under U.S.-backed military campaigns in both Syria and Iraq. One consequence of this progress is that trained and battle-hardened foreign fighters from Europe are more likely to head back to home ground.

That is the alarming paradox of the U.S.-led campaign against the radical group: In the months and even years ahead, an Islamic State defeated in a conventional war may pose a far greater danger to the West than when it was focused on conquering villages in the Euphrates river valley or the hill country of Aleppo.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” warned Bruno Tertrais, senior fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris and former policy adviser at the French Defense Ministry.

“If you manage to deflate Islamic State’s narrative of inevitable expansion, this would eventually reduce its attractiveness, at least for some recruits. But in the short term, as it finds itself in difficulty on one field it will try attacking another,” Mr. Tertrais said.

In the long run, of course, protecting Europe and the U.S. from the kinds of attacks witnessed in Brussels and Paris would be impossible without strangling Islamic State in its cradle.

“The frequency and magnitude of these operations is increasing as refugees are flooding Europe and elsewhere, and as [Islamic State] recruits and brainwashes people already in Europe,” said Ayad Allawi, the former Iraqi prime minister who heads a major parliamentary bloc. “This will have to be dealt with at source, and the source is here in the greater Middle East.”

In the region, there is no doubt that Islamic State’s mantra of “persisting and advancing,” which fueled its aura of invincibility just a year ago, no longer reflects reality on the ground.

In Iraq, Islamic State has lost some 40% of its territory, as government security forces, aided by the U.S., slowly tighten their noose around the group’s stronghold of Mosul in northern Iraq and make major advances in the Anbar province following the retaking of Ramadi.

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In Syria, too, Kurdish militias in recent weeks have pushed closer to Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa, while the moderate opposition has made gains in northern Aleppo and Russian-backed regime forces advance to the outskirts of Palmyra. Probably Islamic State’s highest-ranking foreign fighter, a former Georgian soldier known as Abu Omar al Shishani, was killed in a recent U.S. airstrike.

“ISIS was born in Iraq and Syria, and it is getting defeated in Iraq and Syria,” a senior European official said.

Conventional measures of battlefield progress, however, may be misleading, said Emile Hokayem, senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Bahrain.

“If you measure the campaign against ISIS in terms of loss of territory or number of fighters killed, these are reassuring metrics but they don’t tell us much,” he said. “A group like ISIS will morph and transform, and it will become more lethal in other battlefields.”

In all, at least 5,000 people from Western Europe have traveled to fight with Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and several hundred of them since returned to Europe, according to Western officials. Many others have moved to Islamic State’s new North African strongholds in Libya, much closer to Europe’s shores.

“You now have the phenomenon of these returnees in Europe. While Western governments have been aware of it for some time, there is a degree of critical mass now in the scale of these returns, and that is very alarming,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East.

The carnage in Brussels on Monday and in Paris in November demonstrated the ability of these networks to inflict mass casualties in the heart of Europe despite massive counterterrorism and intelligence efforts deployed against the group.

These sophisticated, complex attacks wouldn’t have been possible without the training received in Islamic State camps in Syria or Iraq, said Guido Steinberg, expert at the German Institute for International and Strategic Affairs and former adviser on international terrorism at the federal Chancellery in Berlin.

No matter how crucial it is to roll back Islamic State-controlled territory, doing so would no longer be sufficient, he added.

“We’re already late. ISIS has been training people for two years now, and there is such a tremendous number of Europeans there,” Mr. Steinberg said.

“It’s extremely dangerous both because of the sheer number of people, which is unprecedented, and because it is clear that the organization has made a strategic decision to attack Europe.”

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com