The U.S. military has waged a series of large strikes on the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria and Iraq over the past month in what appears to be an uptick in the decade-long campaign against the group — operations punctuated by an Islamic State-inspired attack in New Orleans by an Army veteran on New Year’s Day.
However, Pentagon officials and outside experts said the seemingly increased tempo in the campaign to snuff out the group, which began in 2014 with airstrikes in the two countries, is not an indication that the Islamic State is gaining strength but largely a downstream effect of the Russian departure from Syria after the ousting of former ruler Bashar Assad in December.
“When you saw the fall of Assad, you saw Russian assets further consolidate, which allowed U.S. Central Command to take actions in the Badiya desert and elsewhere where we hadn’t previously done a significant amount of strikes,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Wednesday.
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The Islamic State seized Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities, in 2014 with plans to create a global caliphate across the border in Syria, and waged a series of deadly terror attacks that included mass killings, beheadings of aid workers and journalists, and sex slavery. U.S. and Iraqi forces waged a brutal, nine-month battle against the group to retake the city in 2017.
The U.S. has continued its operations against the Islamic State since, although on a much smaller scale that has largely stayed out of the public spotlight.
The group, also known as ISIS, proved that its extremist Islamic ideology is still capable of inspiring terrorism inside the U.S. Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a U.S. citizen from Texas who served in the Army for more than a decade, drove a rented truck with an Islamic State flag down a crowded Bourbon Street in New Orleans on Jan. 1, killing 14 people.
The FBI said Jabbar acted alone, and investigators have released no evidence showing he was in contact with the group in Syria. FBI officials later said that Jabbar posted five videos to his Facebook account on the morning of Jan. 1 in which he said that “he had joined ISIS before this summer.”
Just weeks earlier on Dec. 8, Central Command said it conducted a series of massive strikes against more than 75 Islamic State targets in Syria. The strikes occurred on the same day Assad’s regime collapsed after decades in power.
Those strikes were followed up by more U.S. airstrikes on Dec. 16, an airstrike against an Islamic State leader on Dec. 20, an attack on a weapons convoy on Dec. 23, and another pair of strikes against Islamic State locations in late December and early January in Iraq and Syria.
Defense officials said the operations were just the latest in a multitude of other strikes and actions against the terror group by Central Command this year.
But the size and scope of the latest strikes are much larger and have involved not just jets like the F-16 Fighting Falcon and F-15 but also B-52 Stratofortress bombers and, more recently, ground support aircraft like the A-10 Thunderbolt II.
Jason Campbell, a senior policy researcher at Rand Corp., told Military.com in an interview Friday that the change has been driven in part by “an opportunity to strike ISIS targets with fewer impediments, but also wanting to ensure that they’re not able to, once again, take advantage of a tenuous political situation.”
Campbell said the use of ground support aircraft was notable because it suggested that U.S. officials have “been able to convince the Iraqis and others that there is kind of an opportunity here to deal another significant blow to ISIS if they’re so willing to … take on the risk of the ground incursion.”
In its statement on the most recent pair of strikes, Central Command said the U.S. A-10s were “tasked to support ground forces in the area, [and they] were successful in eliminating the ISIS fighters within a cave.”
The statement also said that one coalition member was killed and two from two different nations were wounded, though Pentagon officials have so far remained silent on which countries the members belonged to.
Both Singh and Campbell said that they don’t see the change in the tenor of the strikes as a sign the Islamic State is reconstituting or growing in power.
The terrorist group is “not remotely where it was 10 years ago,” Dan Byman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a Georgetown University professor, told Military.com on Friday.
At its height, Islamic State territory included about one-third of Syria and 40% of Iraq, and it controlled Mosul and the Syrian city of Raqqa.
Byman said that the aim now is “to make sure the Islamic State isn’t able to expand,” and the strikes keep the group from being effective in planning new operations and attacks.
“By forcing a group to hide from strikes … you don’t gather in large groups, you don’t talk on the phone, you don’t use email,” Byman said. “You try to use lots of security precautions, you know, on and on and on — but when you do that, you can’t really run an organization.”
While Central Command has waged broader strikes, the Islamic State’s power to inspire attacks remains potent, even beyond Jabbar’s rampage on New Year’s Day. Byman said the U.S. saw more Islamic State plots in 2024 than the prior year.
Like Jabbar, it’s not clear those others arrested on U.S. soil for plotting Islamic State attacks ever actually engaged with the group or its leaders. Both Campbell and Byman were skeptical about just how devoted Jabbar was to the ideology of the Islamic terror organization.
But Byman said that the New Orleans attack does show that ISIS, even as a shell of its former self, “still has the power to inspire.”
“You have a network whose message remains fairly constant, [with the] ability to remain a concerning force throughout the rest of the world, even if they’re not … threatening whole swaths of territory,” Campbell noted.
The Department of Homeland Security also warned that “foreign terrorist organizations, including ISIS and al-Qaida maintain their enduring intent to conduct or inspire attacks in the homeland.”
In October, the Department of Justice announced it had arrested an Afghan man who was living in Oklahoma for plotting to “conduct a violent attack on U.S. soil in the name of ISIS” on Election Day. U.S. intelligence officials in August helped foil an ISIS-inspired plot to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Austria.
According to Singh, the group’s ability to inspire attacks is not only a concern for the Pentagon but a reason why the mission in Syria and Iraq is crucial. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he worries about the fate of the thousands of Islamic State fighters who are being held in jails and camps across Syria.
Byman, however, argues that it may take more than just the defeat of the Islamic State to end its ability to drive sympathizers to violence.
“What you want is its legitimacy to be discredited — you want people broadly to reject it — and then over time it’s not inspiring because it’s kind of laughable,” he said. “I think military force has a big impact on the appeal of the brand, but it doesn’t end it completely.”
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