By Raja Abdulrahim
Despite Syrian and Iraqi claims of victory over Islamic State, thousands of militants still holed up in both countries have mounted a number of recent guerrilla-style attacks on civilians and military forces, according to the U.S.-led coalition fighting the extremist group and others.The fighters, hiding in isolated desert or mountain regions or among civilian populations in the neighboring countries, are stepping up hit-and-run style attacks now that they have lost much of the territory they seized several years ago, according to coalition officials, local activists and other experts. “Their way of fighting is like a wounded wolf,” said Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi expert on Islamic State. “A wolf is the only creature that does not flee when wounded. It attacks.”
The U.S.-led coalition warily casts the development as evidence of the group’s diminution. “As [Islamic State] continues to lose land, influence, funding streams and conventional capabilities, we expect them to return to their terrorist roots by conducting high-profile attacks on helpless civilians,” the coalition said last week. “There are less than 3,000 terrorists, most of whom are being hunted down in desert regions in Syria.”
Iraqi militia members in the southern city of Basra watching Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declare victory over Islamic State on television last month.
The coalition said its Syrian allies killed more than 20 of the group’s militants in November as one of its convoys approached the al-Tanf military base in southeastern Syria, where American forces and allied Syrian fighters are based.
What's Next for Islamic State?
The fall of its de facto capital, the Syrian city of Raqqa, doesn't mean Islamic State has been defeated. So what is the militant group's next step? Where are its fighters going, what's happening with its money, and what does it leave behind? WSJ's Niki Blasina reports.
Islamic State guerrilla attacks commonly target U.S.-backed fighters as well as Syrian regime forces. But the group has also detonated suicide bombings at camps for internally displaced Syrians who fled Islamic State-controlled areas.
In Iraq, insurgents disguised as members of a government-backed militia set up fake checkpoints in the Hawija area south of Kirkuk. They assassinated a local police chief and his son, and in a separate attack, a tribal leader and his wife, police said. Days later, militants ambushed an army patrol nearby, killing two Iraqi soldiers.
Many of the militants still in Syria and Iraq were allowed to escape from urban battlefields such as Raqqa under a controversial withdrawal deal with U.S.-backed forces meant to hasten an end to the fighting in group’s former Syrian stronghold.
After uprooting Islamic State from the city of Mosul in June, Iraqi forces claimed a string of victories over the militants in the former Islamic State bastions of Tal Afar, Hawija and the Euphrates river valley. Those battles culminated in an announcement by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in December that the group had been defeated in his country.
The U.S.-led coalition had predicted that those battles after Mosul’s fall would take months, citing intelligence estimates of thousands of militants preparing to make a last stand. In the end, though, the fighting lasted merely days and Iraqi troops encountered almost no resistance.
“It begs the question: Where did they all go?” said Col. Seth Folsom, who commands a U.S. task force that helped Iraqi forces clear Islamic State from an area near the Syria-Iraq border last month.
“I think there’s a good chance many of them have fled across the border” from Iraq to Syria, he added. “There was an opportunity for them to get out the back door then, and I think that’s probably what happened.”
Western countries have feared that the end of Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq would send foreign fighters streaming back home to stage attacks. But most of the group’s attacks lately have been in Syria and Iraq. On Thursday the group’s affiliate in Afghanistan claimed responsibility for a suicide attack in Kabul that killed 41 people.
Jennifer Cafarella, an analyst for the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, said maintaining sleeper cells is a crucial part of Islamic State’s long-term strategy to resurge. Its decisions to withdraw early from several battlefields across Syria and Iraq were aimed at preserving capability for future use, she said.
Residents say many Islamic State militants shave their beards and otherwise alter their appearance to mix in with displaced civilians and flee. Some pay smugglers and bribe fighters manning checkpoints to get to parts of northern Syria under control of U.S.-backed forces or Turkish-backed rebels, according to civilians who have fled these areas.
Mr. al-Hashimi estimates that 800 to 850 fighters are left in Iraq and will likely harass security forces for the next couple of years. Most of the remaining fighters there have found sanctuary in areas that have historically been beyond the government’s reach, such as the Hamrin mountain range in the north and the vast western desert, where deep ravines make hiding relatively easy. Thousands of militants are also believed to be lying low in another expanse of desert of eastern Syria.
A Syrian Democratic Forces fighter inspecting a former Islamic State prison in the town of Tabqa after its capture from Islamic State militants in May. PHOTO: RODI SAID/REUTERS
As they have in the past, the militants exploit gaps between security command centers in different provinces. An offensive by Iraqi forces to retake territory controlled by its Kurdish allies in northern Iraq in October created a security vacuum that gave some militants a chance to re-infiltrate parts of the region, according to security officials, analysts and civilians.
An Iraqi police colonel in the Hawija district south of Kirkuk said remnants of Islamic State had threatened civilians not to cooperate with the security forces or international organizations involved in reconstruction.
Security forces are preparing to conduct an operation in the area to root out fleeing Islamic State militants, according to a source in the Kirkuk operations command.
“We’re not really sure what’s next…if it’s ISIS 2.0,” said Col. Folsom. “History has shown that the ungoverned spaces—the dark areas—those are breeding grounds for extremism.”
Islamic State has a history of reinventing itself. After its origins as an al Qaeda-linked insurgency in Iraq, it aligned itself with antigovernment rebels in Syria and then became a quasi-state controlling a large territory. Now it has reverted to an insurgency.
“You cannot solve an insurgency with military force alone,” Ms. Cafarella said. “As long as Iraq cities remain destroyed, as long as Iranian proxies continue to get stronger, as long as the Assad regime continues to grow stronger, ISIS will continue to represent a mantle of Sunni resistance, however horrific.”
A Syrian girl crosses a destroyed street in Raqqa last month, two months after it was freed from Islamic State control. PHOTO: DELIL SOULEIMAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
—Nour Alakraa in Berlin contributed to this article.
Write to Raja Abdulrahim at raja.abdulrahim@wsj.com
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