ISIS awaits a chance to exploit violent vacuum in Syria

The US strikes this week on ISIS sites were a sharp reminder that while Assad may be gone, the jihadists are far from a spent force. They’ll use this period to try to re-establish themselves in Syria.

Isis formed a caliphate across Iraqi and Syrian borders after the civil war began in 2011. Picture: Alamy.

Bashar al-Assad had barely fled his country before the US announced that it had carried out dozens of airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Syria.

The strikes were a sharp reminder that while Assad may be gone, the jihadists are far from a spent force. On Monday Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, said: “History shows how quickly moments of promise can descend into conflict and violence. Isis will try to use this period to re-establish its capabilities.”

ISIS has already killed at least 54 fleeing government soldiers in the Sukhna area in Homs province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said yesterday.

It was the localised power vacuums and chaos after the 2011 uprisings in Syria that opened the door for ISIS to grow there. Assad sowed the seeds of it two decades ago when he allowed Syria to become a transit ground for foreign fighters seeking to take on the Americans occupying Iraq. He helped incubate the terrorist group that would form a caliphate stretching across the Iraqi and Syrian borders. In the early throes of the civil war, he freed jailed jihadists in the hope that their extremism would taint the movement against him.

Assad’s narrative that all who opposed him were psychopathic extremists became a complicating factor for outsiders picking a side. While instrumental in its rise, Assad had little to do with ISIS’s final territorial defeat, in the town of Bargouz, led on the ground by the western-backed Kurdish majority Syrian Democratic Forces and pounded from above by American firepower. Even after ISIS’s loss of territory, Washington said that up to 20,000 insurgents were at large.

An Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant fighter waves a Black flag during a military parade in Raqqa in 2014. Picture: AFP.

The US was scathing about allies who refused to repatriate their citizens to face trials at home. Thousands remain in prisons in northwest Syria under the custody of mostly Syrian Kurdish forces, now in the sights of the Turkish government and military who see the end of Assad’s rule as a chance to rid themselves of the troublesome national aspirations of the Kurdish people.

Those imprisoned jihadists represented the greatest threat of a resurgence of ISIS. It was born in the American-run detention camps of Iraq before its fighters moved to Syria after the uprising. Large numbers of captured ISIS fighters were repatriated to Iraq, where they were executed or remain on death row. Those in Syria remain in legal and political limbo. In the civilian camps such as al-Hol, where ISIS wives and families are held, the first “cubs of the caliphate”, as ISIS called them, are nearing their teens.

News that Israeli forces have crossed into Syria since Assad’s fall have chimed with fears of an Islamist takeover among Syrian civilians. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leader who has seized power in Damascus, has spoken in emollient terms of Syria’s future.

ISIS fighters in Raqqa, northern Syria, ten years ago. Picture: Alamy.

ISIS’s barbarism so eclipsed even that of al-Qa’ida that the former allies swiftly turned to enemies. The falling-out is reminiscent of that between al-Qa’ida and the Taliban in Afghanistan where today, despite the Taliban being in power, ISIS is on the rise.

ISIS has little appetite for Mr Jolani’s talk of tolerance. The uprising in 2011 was nothing more for ISIS than a dragon it could ride to power. What it created, however, was a failed and fragmented state, all too easy for an apocalyptic cult and its charismatic leader to turn into its so-called “caliphate”.

It was the West on which ISIS focused its firepower and hatred, drawing in so many foreign fighters for its warped mission. The Middle East has changed since then. The bloodshed in Gaza stands out as a potential rallying cry for new jihadists. In recent weeks, the Arab League, having readmitted Assad’s Syria, was leaning on him to break with Iran.

Europe was also dipping its toe in the water, to discuss illegal immigration. None of this will be quickly forgotten.

The Times