The operation went almost without a hitch. Swooping low over the horizon in the early dawn light, the helicopters disgorged their cargo of commandos into a dried-out riverbed.
Surveillance drones guided them successfully to the enemy’s remote hideouts. The resistance was intense, the insurgents they encountered wore suicide belts and hurled grenades.
But after hours of fierce fighting, the mission was clearly a success. Among the 14 enemy dead were four of the movement’s leaders.
What may sound like an encounter between Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah fighters in the hills of southern Lebanon was actually a battle in the desert of western Iraq between US-led forces and militants from the resurgent militant group Isis.
With 100 US Special Forces personnel fighting alongside Iraqi troops, the mission on Aug 29 was the largest mounted by the US in Iraq for years.
But while it yielded significant breakthroughs, including the killing of Ahmed al-Ithawi, the top Isis commander in Iraq, the fact that such an operation was needed at all is a sign that the drums of global jihadism are again sounding around the world.
From Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley to the ungoverned fringes of the Sahara, from the floodplains of the Euphrates to the limestone mountains of Puntland in Somalia, al-Qaeda and particularly Isis are regrouping in a world where America’s military reach continues to fade.
This week, Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, became the latest international figure to voice alarm about the resurgence of both groups as he gave warning that Isis in particular once again posed a threat to Britain.
“Today’s Islamic State is not the force it was a decade ago,” he told reporters. “But after a few years of being pinned well back, they’ve resumed their efforts to export terrorism.”
Already this year, Isis has struck well beyond its heartlands. In January, it carried out the worst terrorist attack in Iran’s modern history, killing 100 people at a memorial event for Qassem Soleimani, the military commander assassinated by a US drone in 2020.
Two months later, Isis gunmen opened fire at a rock concert in Moscow, killing 154 people, while the movement’s plot to bomb a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna in August was foiled by the CIA.
The most ambitious plots to carry out “spectacular” acts of terror in countries judged as enemies of Sunni Islam have been linked to the Afghan affiliate of Isis, known as Isis-Khorasan.
The US military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the return to power of the Taliban have enabled the recovery of both al-Qaeda and Isis on Afghan soil, albeit for different reasons.
Powerful elements within the Taliban have offered protection and support to al-Qaeda. Its late leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was living in a safe house owned by the Haqqani Network, a leading Taliban faction when he was killed in a US drone strike on Kabul’s diplomatic quarter in 2022.
Despite that setback, al-Qaeda has only grown stronger.
Afghan resistance groups say it has erected nine training camps and has even built munitions depots in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul, something it had been unable to do even when the movement was in its pomp before the Sept 11 2001 attacks.
By contrast, Isis-Khorasan is a sworn enemy of the Taliban, which it views as selling out to the Americans.
Unable to control its borders, the Taliban has failed to prevent the group from recruiting foreign fighters and increasing in size, scope and geographical ambition.
While its Afghan affiliate has gained the most global attention, the recovery of Isis in its traditional heartlands in Syria and Iraq unnerves US officials even more.
Isis capable of attacks abroad
Gen Michael Kurilla, head of United States Central Command, warns that Isis in Syria and Iraq has grown so rapidly that it is again capable of carrying out attacks abroad.
Already the number of fighters in Syria and Iraq has doubled to 2,500, the US believes, with Israel’s war in Gaza and now in Lebanon serving to radicalise a new generation of Muslims and provide a flood of recruits to jihadi groups.
“The issue of Israel is so transcendental to the jihadist groups, it is so important to hate on Israel, that it has definitely energised the global jihad movement in a way that has not been seen for many years,” said Shiraz Maher, an expert on jihadi groups at King’s College London.
Isis may still be a long way off its peak in 2014 when it controlled territory the size of Britain in Iraq, Syria and beyond and inflicted terror across Europe, including the Manchester Arena bombing that killed 22 people as they left an Ariana Grande concert in 2017.
Back then it had more than 40,000 fighters in 80 countries until a US-led mission saw it lose its hold in Iraq in 2017 and Syria two years later.
While Isis mostly remains on the back foot in Iraq, the US is struggling to contain the group’s growing foothold in Syria’s Badiya, the lawless desert region on the western bank of the Euphrates where it is training young recruits to become suicide bombers.
Already the number of Isis attacks in Syria has more than doubled this year, despite an increase in US air strikes, the most recent of which was carried out on Friday.
With just 2,500 troops left in Iraq and another 900 in Syria, the US military position is already stretched thin and is coming under increased pressure due to attacks on its bases in the region by Iran-backed Shia groups.
Meanwhile, under pressure from neighbouring Iran, the Iraqi government has concluded a preliminary agreement with Washington that will see US troops leave Iraq over the coming two years.
Without a military presence in Iraq, US efforts to contain Isis in Syria are likely to fail, experts warn.
Yet a military solution alone would not solve the problem anyway, says Joshua Landis, a Middle East expert at the University of Oklahoma.
He warns that Syria will remain a breeding ground for Isis as long as the country remains divided into three weak statelets controlled by Turkey, the US-backed Kurds and the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which is supported by Iran.
“Isis can run through the legs of these three different statelets and can escape justice because each one of these authorities sees the others as the primary danger to them, not Isis,” Mr Landis said.
Worst jihadist-inflicted bloodshed in Sahel
As worrying as the situation in Syria is, by far the worst jihadist-inflicted bloodshed is in Africa’s Sahel, the scrubland on the southern fringes of the Sahara Desert.
Over just a few hours in August, al-Qaeda-linked militants swept through the remote town of Barsalogho in Burkina Faso on motorcycles and massacred 600 people, many of them women and children, according to French security officials.
A series of Kremlin-backed coups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have brought to power military juntas that have utterly failed to rein in the jihadists, who have killed at least 38,000 people in the three countries since 2018.
Ordering US and French forces to leave, the three regimes instead chose to rely on Russian mercenaries, who then carried out massacres of their own, thus helping to bolster jihadist recruitment and allowing the Islamists to gain ground.
The militants seem only to be growing more brazen. Last month they attacked Bamako, the capital of Mali, where jihadists killed more than 1,200 people in the first six months of the year alone.
Seeking to contain the crisis, the US is now trying to bolster West African states on the Atlantic shoreline, such as Ghana, Nigeria and Ivory Coast, amid fears of Islamist contagion.
In 2019, after Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a US raid, Donald Trump, then the US president, claimed “100 per cent” success in the war against Isis.
Western officials similarly hoped that al-Qaeda, while still a force in localised conflicts in Yemen, Somalia and the Sahel, would never again be a significant global threat.
A mere five years later, those assessments increasingly look like wishful thinking.
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