ISIS Was Staging Comeback When U.S. Raid Led to Leader Qurayshi’s Death

Islamic State, the terrorist organization that once made Raqqa the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate, has regrouped in the three years since it lost its territory in Iraq and Syria, launching a comeback in recent weeks that suffered a blow Thursday with the killing of its top leader.

Since a U.S.-backed coalition dislodged Islamic State from power in 2019, the jihadist group has transformed into an underground insurgency with the ability to stage deadly attacks. It still has tens of millions of dollars to finance its operations, here in the desert and around the world, U.S. officials say.

People in northeast Syria say Islamic State has ramped up extortion and smuggling in recent months, while maintaining a steady drumbeat of gun and bomb attacks on soldiers and civilians. The group’s black flags have appeared in places in northeast Syria, witnesses say.

In January, Islamic State killed 11 Iraqi soldiers sleeping in their tents, and in Syria the group carried out its worst attack in the region in nearly three years, a prison break in Hasakah that sparked a weeklong gunbattle that left nearly 500 people dead.

As many as 200 U.S. soldiers and American warplanes were involved in putting down the prison break, providing a reminder that 900 U.S. troops are still stationed in Syria, mainly to keep fighting Islamic State. American troops and U.S.-backed local forces were still searching for Islamic State members hiding in houses around the prison this week, with deadly clashes.

The killing of Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi is likely to open yet another chapter in the history of an extremist group that has demonstrated an ability to remake itself. The group’s recent resurgence took place after the U.S. killed its previous top leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019.

 “They killed Abu Bakr Baghdadi, the organization expanded,” said Sheikh Huweidi al-Shleish al-Mujhim, a tribal leader in Raqqa who opposes the extremists. “They are everywhere.”

Islamic State’s persistence poses an uncomfortable dilemma for the Biden administration, which has sought to pivot away from Middle East wars to better take on China and Russia.

U.S. officials have expressed concern in recent months that Islamic State still has between $25 million to $50 million—down from hundreds of millions of dollars in 2020, but still enough to finance global operations.

Islamic State continues to send money to support its branches around the globe to buy weapons, supplies and stipends for fighters and their families, the U.S. Treasury Department said last year.

“While ISIS’s so-called physical caliphate has been—has crumbled, it remains a determined and dangerous enemy,” John Godfrey, the State Department’s acting special envoy to the Coalition to Defeat ISIS, said in December.

There is little chance that the group could seize a major city as it seized Raqqa in 2013. The city has sprung back to life since it was recaptured from Islamic State in 2017 in which U.S. warplanes reduced much of the city to rubble.

But residents and security officials remain concerned about Islamic State’s persistence as an underground militant group.

Security forces affiliated with the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led administration completed a security sweep of Raqqa on Thursday that resulted in 27 people being detained including Islamic State suspects, security officials in Raqqa said. The operation also seized seven illegal weapons, the officials said.

Young men have been trickling back into Islamic State’s fold. Factors driving recruitment include Syria’s economic crisis, made worse by U.S. sanctions on President Bashar Al Assad’s government; a drought that has undermined farming; and the continuing war in the country.

In the village of Karama on the edge of Raqqa, a laborer named Abu Hussein sat in his friend’s carpentry shop on Thursday. He said people there still live in fear of Islamic State.

“We lived under them here before. If they come back, they’ll behead us,” he said.

The Jan. 20 prison break in Hasakah was the most ambitious attack the group has attempted in years, involving hundreds of fighters and a suicide truck bomb rammed into the compound’s wall. Prisoners inside rose up against their prison guards and then poured into the surrounding area, invading houses and searching for members of the security forces with the help of local informants, then executing them, residents said.

Prison breaks were among the tactics Baghdadi called upon Islamic State to use to replenish its ranks after its territorial loss. Thousands of its members are detained in prisons overseen by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led militia that oversees a quasi-independent territory in northeast Syria and runs the detention facilities.

The group’s most recent attacks appeared intended to test the group’s fighting capabilities after a period of regrouping, said Hasan Abu Hanieh, an Amman, Jordan-based analyst of Islamic movements. He said Islamic State has lost almost 50 top commanders in the past seven to eight years, leaving a new generation that security agencies may not recognize.

“The attacks are becoming more sophisticated, which indicates that we will be witnessing more violent, more complex and broader incidents,” Mr. Hanieh said.

In Hasakah, Islamic State continues to fight in the streets, even after losing control of the prison.

The SDF’s mop-up operations erupted into violence on Tuesday evening just before sunset, when two suspected Islamic State members wearing suicide vests were shot dead in the street. With journalists nearby, the SDF shot the men as they ran across a road near the prison.

Pickup trucks carrying masked SDF fighters sped past, followed by an armored vehicle with flashing red and blue lights.

The two slain militants, draped in black and brown clothes, their explosive vests on display, lay dead next to the concrete divider of a broad paved road. SDF gunmen shouted for passersby to stand back while they approached the bodies, preparing to defuse the explosives. SDF soldiers said four other militants were hiding in the area.

SDF soldiers wearing balaclavas conducted house-to-house searches this week, hunting for Islamic State members who had managed to hide out in the neighborhood adjacent to the prison. At night, suspected militants have fired at the military checkpoints that ring the neighborhood.

In the neighborhood surrounding the prison, dozens of houses are in ruins after the SDF bulldozed them to kill Islamic State members who barricaded themselves inside.

Stunned residents picked through rubble and swept up broken glass. On a nearby road, a fire burned from an oil tanker set on fire during the battle. The electricity, cut by the authorities during the fighting to flush out the extremists, has yet to be restored.

Jamal Salah Khader, 40 years old, recalled how the militants barricaded themselves in one of his family’s houses while he sheltered in another house across the street, around midnight on Jan. 20.