ISIS, Battered but Potent, Returns to Its Insurgent Roots
Nagata said that When I consider how much damage we’ve inflicted
and they’re still operational, they’re still capable of pulling off things like some of these attacks we’ve seen internationally,
that We spend an inordinate amount of time and resources as the United States,
but also as our partners, trying to not only defeat ISIS and their control of the physical caliphate, but their virtual space that they own,
Fighting under various names and leaders, the Sunni militants who would evolve into the Islamic State killed many Iraqis
and American troops before Sunni tribal fighters paid by the United States decimated them, driving the survivors underground by the time the United States withdrew from Iraq in 2011.
Now, senior American intelligence and counterterrorism officials say
that more than 60,000 Islamic State fighters have been killed since June 2014, including much of the group’s leadership, and that the group has lost about two-thirds of its peak territory.
In Syria, most of its top operatives have fled Raqqa in the past six months for other towns still under ISIS control in the Euphrates River valley, according to American
and Western military and counterterrorism officials who have received intelligence briefings.
But the loss of its two largest cities will not spell a final defeat for the Islamic State — also known as ISIS, ISIL
and Daesh — according to analysts and American and Middle Eastern officials.
Its leadership and its ability to grow back are still there." The Islamic State has overshadowed its jihadist precursors like Al Qaeda by not just holding territory,
but by running cities and their hinterlands for an extended period, winning the group credibility in the militant world and allowing it to build a complex organization.
