Leader’s death is another blow for the Islamic State, but it’s hardly the end
Categories: FOREIGN COUNTRIES
For a man who sought to disappear, the leader of the Islamic State group seemed to have done everything right.American commandos came for him anyway, and on Thursday, the leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, blew himself up during a raid on his hideout in northwestern Syria, U.S. officials said.American leaders hailed al-Qurayshi’s death as a fresh wound to a fearsome organization whose reach and power had already been greatly diminished. But terrorism analysts warned that killing yet another leader would not erase a group whose members have continued to seek refuge and plan attacks in chaotic parts of the globe. The United States has invested great resources in killing leaders of terrorist organizations. U.S. forces took out Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaida, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who led al-Qaida in Iraq, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, al-Qurayshi’s predecessor at the helm of the Islamic State group.While such attacks generate dramatic headlines, the groups they sought to undermine have often resurfaced in new and more powerful forms or simply replaced old heads with new ones, Hydra-style. The killing of al-Qurayshi deprived the Islamic State of a key religious and military authority at a time when the group had already been routed from its territory and lost a huge number of fighters. Now it faces a potential leadership vacuum.In recent weeks, its fighters in Iraq killed 10 Iraqi soldiers and an officer in a nighttime attack on an army post and beheaded a police officer on camera. In Syria, the jihadis attacked a prison in an attempt to free thousands of their former comrades and occupied the compound for more than a week before a Kurdish-led militia supported by the United States drove them out. After al-Qurayshi took control, the United States put a bounty of up to $10 million on his head and said he “helped drive and justify the abduction, slaughter and trafficking of members of Yazidi religious minority groups” in Iraq and oversaw “the group’s global operations.”As it searches for a replacement, the militant group no longer has a large pool to draw from because years of concerted counterterrorism operations by the United States and its partners have killed so much of the group’s inner circle, an expert on the Islamic State, Hassan Hassan, wrote Thursday in New Lines, an online magazine. The draw of chaotic places likely explains why al-Qurayshi sought refuge in Idlib province, in Syria’s northwest, miles from his organization’s past strongholds.The area is one of the last territories still controlled by the rebels who set out to topple President Bashar Assad, and it is packed with millions of people who fled from elsewhere during the war, making it easier for strangers to blend in. The Islamic State’s future could depend less on who its leaders are than on the opportunities for expansion that present themselves, and the group’s ability to take advantage of them.“What we have seen in the jihadi movement on the whole over the last two decades is that it is highly pragmatic in the pursuit of its goals,” said Shiraz Maher, author of a book on the history of the global jihadi movement. “Their next move is to continue to hold out and bide their time and react to the realities as they pan out.”