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ISIS Never Went Away in Iraq

(Defense One) Krishnadev Calamur - ISIS is supposed to have gone away. Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi declared "final victory" over the group last December. But attacks this week in Anbar province and Kirkuk show that ISIS is active in both areas. "ISIS never went anywhere," Michael Knights, an expert on Iraq at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. "All they did was in every area where they lost the ability to control terrain, they immediately transitioned to an insurgency." Knights said ISIS doesn't view the loss of the major Iraqi cities it controlled "as the end of their operations. They just view it as a movement to a new phase of their operation....You can see that ISIS had returned to the very targeted violence that allowed it to dominate the rural areas in 2012-2013." Over the past six months, 84 villages have seen their village leaders murdered by ISIS without the security forces being able to do anything about it. "What this does is completely erode the faith of the population in the security forces," he said. "They don't inform on ISIS. And, eventually, their kids start to see ISIS as the strongest forces in the area....You can say that almost all of Iraq has been liberated from ISIS during the day, but you can't say that at night."
2018-09-06 00:00:00
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