Introduction

"Soon after buying her, the fighter brought the teenage girl a round box containing four strips of pills, one of them colored red."1 This is a line from a story by Rukmini Callimachi of The New York Times from March 12, 2016. Re-read that line again, and let it sink in. The sentence describes a jihadist terrorist from the Islamic State (IS) who purchased a teenage girl, from the Yazidi religious minority in Iraq, at the equivalent of a slave auction and was forcing her to consume birth-control pills to ensure that, no matter how many times he savagely raped her, his captive would not become pregnant. This situation played itself out throughout parts of territory in Iraq and Syria under the control of IS, which declared itself a caliphate and set out to build what terrorism expert Martha Crenshaw calls a "counter-state" using any and all means necessary, including rape, murder, and torture.2

The brutality was not merely limited to sexual slavery. There were also beheadings and crucifixions. Some IS captives were burned alive, while others were locked in a cage and submerged in water until they drowned. Many of these actions were recorded and posted online by the group itself, to promote a level of anomic violence that would come to shape and in many ways define its brand. Just a few years ago, horrified onlookers must have wondered how we arrived at a place where a terrorist organization could conquer and control territory, systematically eliminate its rivals, and intimidate the international community from action to halt this blatant display of barbarism.

By mid-2018, the physical caliphate had all but been destroyed, its fighters killed, captured, and chased from their erstwhile strongholds in Raqqa and Mosul. But, as Graeme Wood points out, the caliphate was more than just a territory or a proto-state - it was, and indeed still is, "a phenomenon in both physical and mental space."3 IS as an idea, as an ideology, and as a worldview is far from over. The group will eventually seek to relocate to another country and establish new franchise and affiliate groups. The purpose of this book is to analyze what happens next with the Islamic State and to determine whether or not, and to what extent, it will manage to adapt and regroup after the physical fall of the caliphate. What form will its relationship with al-Qaeda take? How might its tactics and strategy change in the future? This book will attempt to answer these questions and more, while taking stock of IS - its roots, its evolution, and its monumental setbacks - to provide some insights into what the road ahead could look like.

In many respects, the establishment of the caliphate was an anomaly. Historically, the global jihadist movement has been largely decentralized, consistently inconsistent in its ability to marshal the resources and groundswell of support necessary to achieve anything close to what IS did when it established the caliphate with a headquarters in Raqqa. From bin Laden to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the global jihadist movement has had its share of charismatic personalities. But for the past four decades, it rarely constituted anything close to a monolithic movement operating with a common purpose and core agenda.

The future of the movement is therefore likely to resemble its past - with peripatetic and divided groups of militants dispersing to new battlefields, from North Africa to Southeast Asia, where they will join existing civil wars, establish safe havens and sanctuaries, and seek ways of conducting spectacular attacks in the West that inspire new followers and motivate existing supporters. In this fragmented and atomized form, IS could become even more dangerous and challenging for counterterrorism forces, as its splinter groups threaten renewed and heightened violence throughout the globe. Even if foreign fighters return home in much smaller numbers than initially expected, the next five-year period could very well be characterized by a spike in attacks.

At its peak from 2014 to 2016, the caliphate briefly represented the apex of the global jihadist movement - the closest thing it has ever had to a lasting presence. But with the caliphate in ruins, it will revert to decentralized and dispersed clusters of groups and lone individuals or self-starter groups, tenuously linked by ideology and common cause, although, as history has shown, over time parochial interests tend to trump the movement's globally focused veneer.4 In order to understand how we got to where we are today and what lies ahead, it is critical to look back to the roots of IS - both how and what it learned from its predecessors, and how it differs from other milieus within the global jihadist universe.

The opening chapter takes us from the beginnings of the global Salafi-jihadist movement following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and traces its evolution through the next three decades, leading up to the events of September 11, 2001. Initially dubbed the "Arab Afghans," fighters from the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere flocked to Afghanistan to help repel the Soviet Red Army following Moscow's hasty invasion. These militants moved on following the Afghan conflict to form the core of al-Qaeda, growing the organization in Sudan before branching out to fight in places like Somalia, Bosnia, Algeria, and Chechnya during the 1990s. Differences over objectives and ideology led to numerous splits within the movement, as fighters dispersed from al-Qaeda to join existing militant groups throughout the globe, although due to the trappings of globalization, many were able to remain linked to the core organization from perches in Southeast Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.

After the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and an unrelenting drone campaign, al-Qaeda scattered and established franchise operations in Yemen (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP), North Africa (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, AQIM), and Iraq (al-Qaeda in Iraq, AQI), while also maintaining ties with groups in parts of Africa (al-Shabaab) and Asia (Abu Sayyaf Group and Jemmah Islamiyah). Core al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan was largely decimated, but several of the franchise groups flourished during this period, including AQAP and AQI, the latter of which was led by the spiritual godfather of IS, the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Over time, AQI would morph into the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) in the mid-2000s, a name which the group would keep until early 2013 when it changed officially to IS, following its falling-out with al-Qaeda. The detailed history of the movement described in this first chapter is critical because one potential future alternative in the post-caliphate environment is a return to the franchising model that al-Qaeda pioneered following the onslaught against its core organization based in South Asia.

The book then moves to explore the genesis of the Islamic State and the structural factors and variables that contributed to its rise, including rampant sectarianism in Iraq and the political vacuum caused by the Syrian civil war. A close look at IS infrastructure, decision-making apparatus, and its approach to building the caliphate shows how each informed the group's approach to conquering new territory and implementing the pillars of a sovereign state, while also developing a unique ability to recruit foreign fighters. This analysis is accompanied by a strategic snapshot of IS's ideology, its long-term objectives, and a discussion of the group's capacity to plan and conduct attacks (operational capabilities) and to maintain itself as a cohesive entity (organizational capabilities). In particular, it is these organizational capabilities which will play a substantial role in determining the future of the organization, helping it transition smoothly from a territorially based insurgent organization to an underground, clandestine terrorist group. Its network-like qualities, affiliate franchise groups, and social media expertise contribute to its protean structure and ability to survive.

The Islamic State is a pioneering terrorist group in several ways, from its ability to raise and spend money to its multi-tiered approach to conducting terrorist attacks (inspired vs. directed). IS's use of social media and encryption to direct terrorist attacks overseas sets it apart from any terrorist groups of the past. As evidenced by the Paris November 2015 attacks and the Brussels March 2016 attacks, at its peak, IS sustained the ability to strike into the heart of Europe. The second chapter examines various aspects of the group's financing and its tactics, including how IS operates on the battlefield, from vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) to ambushes and hit-and-run attacks. This extends to IS's exhortation for its followers to conduct attacks in the West, including a synopsis of so-called vehicular terrorism, a tactic pioneered by IS that has emerged as a new trend in terrorism directed against the West.

Chapter 3 offers a rigorous evaluation of the Islamic State's future, based - in part - on the current trends we are witnessing. This includes a deeper discussion of the so-called free-agent jihadists or roving militants who will seek to travel to active conflict zones to link up with existing terrorist and insurgent groups, acting as a force multiplier. For most of its surviving fighters, the war is not over - many of these militants will almost certainly move on to new battlefields to continue waging jihad. As New Yorker columnist and Middle East...