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Thousands of ISIS Fighters Flee in Syria, Many to Fight Another Day

Fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces standing guard in Raqqa in October after retaking the city from Islamic State fighters.
FEB. 4, 2018
WASHINGTON — Thousands of Islamic State foreign fighters and family members have escaped the American-led military campaign in eastern Syria, according to new classified American and other Western military and intelligence assessments, a flow that threatens to tarnish American declarations that the militant group has been largely defeated.
As many of the fighters flee unfettered to the south and west through Syrian Army lines, some have gone into hiding near Damascus, the Syrian capital, and in the country’s northwest, awaiting orders sent by insurgent leaders on encrypted communications channels.
Other battle-hardened militants, some with training in chemical weapons, are defecting to Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria. Others are paying smugglers tens of thousands of dollars to spirit them across the border to Turkey, with an eventual goal of returning home to European countries.
The sobering assessments come despite a concerted effort to encircle and “annihilate” — as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis put it — Islamic State fighters in Raqqa, the group’s self-proclaimed capital, which fell in the fall, and pursue other insurgents who fled south into the Euphrates River Valley toward the border with Iraq.
“ISIS fighters are fleeing Syria and Iraq,” the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, said in remarks in Washington last week. “Jihadists are going underground, dispersing to other safe havens, including on the internet, and returning to their home countries.”
Gen. Paul J. Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters last week that the remaining Islamic State leadership, even while on the run, still had “fairly robust” communications with its shadowy network of fighters now on the lam.
While President Trump highlighted the liberation of almost all of the Islamic State’s territory in Iraq and Syria [ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/30/us/politics/fact-check-sotu.html ] in his State of the Union address last week, American military and intelligence officials say the group is still able to inspire and enable followers to carry out attacks. Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledged this in his speech, noting, “There is much more work to be done.”
Analysts say they are also seeing signs that Islamic State fighters are adopting guerrilla tactics to terrorize civilians.
“The group is transitioning into an underground organization that places more weight on asymmetric tactics, like suicide bombings against soft targets in government-secured areas like Baghdad,” said Otso Iho, a senior analyst at Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center at IHS Markit in London.
Mr. Iho cited an attack by two suicide bombers [ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/world/middleeast/iraq-baghdad-isis-bombing.html ] in Baghdad last month that killed three dozen people and injured 90 more. The attack took place in a busy Baghdad square [ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/world/middleeast/baghdad-bombings.html ] where day laborers gather to look for work.
Estimates of how many fighters may have escaped into the deserts of Syria or Iraq and beyond are difficult to pin down, but American and other Western intelligence and counterterrorism analysts with access to classified assessments put the number in the low thousands. Many are traveling with spouses and children who are likely to have been radicalized during more than three years of Islamic State control of the region and could pose security risks as well, analysts say.
In December, Col. Ryan Dillon, the chief spokesman for the American-led military campaign in Iraq and Syria, said in a briefing with Pentagon reporters: “Syrian regime commanders in eastern Syria suggest that ISIS fighters” from the Middle Euphrates River Valley “may have slipped through porous Syrian and Russian defenses to arrive in areas near Damascus.”
Asked late last month by The New York Times about indications that as many as 1,000 fighters and family members had fled the Euphrates River area just in recent days, Colonel Dillon’s command replied in a statement: “We know that the Syrian regime has given ISIS the leeway to travel through their area of operations, but we cannot confirm any alleged incidents or operations that are taking place outside our area of operations.”
The United States military is concerned that a Turkish offensive against the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces in Afrin, in northern Syria, has worsened the problem. The S.D.F. has been working with the Americans in former Islamic State-held areas to interdict fleeing jihadists, but those efforts have been greatly reduced as the Kurds have shifted resources to reinforce Afrin.
Mustafa Balli, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces headquarters, blamed the Turkish assault on Afrin for what he said was the Islamic State’s resurgence.
“Since this invasion of Afrin by Turkey, ISIS is getting stronger in the south,” he said. “The battle against ISIS in the south, and the Turks in Afrin, is the same battle. The Turks want to give another chance to ISIS to grow again. Before the Turkish invasion, we were very close to finishing ISIS.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/world/middleeast/isis-syria-al-qaeda.html [with comments]