A long-feared Islamic State resurgence may arrive this year, military officials and national security insiders warn, as conditions are brewing across the Middle East and Africa for the group’s second coming as a major terrorist force and threat to global stability.
It would be a remarkable resurgence for a terrorist group whose “caliphate” once controlled a broad swath of land in Iraq and Syria only to be routed by a U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign.
Specialists say the Islamic State group, better known as ISIS, is almost surely plotting a deadly revenge campaign against the U.S. and its partners after numerous American strikes in Syria last year killed several of the group’s leaders and highest-ranking officials.
ISIS may not be the powerhouse it was nearly a decade ago, but with thousands of fighters in its ranks, the group is still fully capable of carrying out deadly terrorist attacks. Some U.S. analysts warn of “strategic neglect” by the U.S. and its allies to the threat of an Islamic State resurgence.
Over the past week, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for an attack in the Egyptian city of Ismailia that killed four people and a bombing near the Afghan capital of Kabul that killed and wounded several people, local Afghan officials said. The Kabul bombing was the latest in a string of attacks by ISIS and its affiliates in Afghanistan since the Taliban retook control of the country.
The highest-profile attack was the August 2021 suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. Marines at the height of the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from the country.
Reporting from The Washington Times.
