The Return of the Black Flags
10th October 2024
We seem to have reached a hinge moment in the long-running battle against the Islamic State. In recent months, the jihadist outfit has been mustering forces in Syria’s Badiya desert, recruiting and training a new band of holy warriors to resurrect its dream of ruling a caliphate. The rallying of jihadist forces and the corresponding outburst of violence have not been out of the ordinary in this vast ungoverned space, but they may yet prove combustible enough to engulf Syria and parts of Iraq.
This year, the number of attacks in Syria and Iraq has doubled. The primary targets of the growing insurgency have been US garrisons in Syria and units of the Syrian Democratic Forces, Kurdish-led troops whom the US helped to defeat the militant group five years ago. The jihadists’ immediate objective has been to curtail counter-terrorism patrols and free thousands of their confederates from jail, where they have languished since the SDF and US-led coalition recaptured the Islamic State’s last bastion.
Since laying waste to the caliphate in 2019, the US has maintained a small but robust military presence in Syria and Iraq, conducting a largely surreptitious campaign to suppress the remnants of IS. US warplanes carry out airstrikes and provide live aerial surveillance to SDF ground forces conducting raids on suspected Islamic State cells. Occasionally, American commandos undertake missions of their own to kill or capture senior Islamic State leaders. In 2024, the SDF has reportedly captured 233 Islamic State fighters in 28 operations while American aircraft have conducted three strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and one in Iraq. This level of kinetic activity mirrors 2023, when the US carried out four strikes against Islamic State.
Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.