Islamic State (IS) remnants in Syria appear emboldened by recent events. Syrian interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa’s government offensive against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has strategically weakened that longtime adversary, and thousands of IS affiliates escaped detention.

On top of this, the US is withdrawing its remaining troops imminently. Analysts believe that IS remains too weak to mount any resurgence, overthrow al-Sharaa’s government, or conquer territory, as it infamously did in the mid-2010s.

Nevertheless, even in its present diminished state, IS remains dangerous.

Hollow speech

IS spokesman Abu Hudhayfa Al Ansari released a new recording on 22 February. Syria, he said, has entered a “new chapter” of struggle. He charged that Damascus under al-Sharaa is “subservient” to Washington and accused him of being “beholden to the devils of Turks and the West”.

IS claimed responsibility for recent attacks targeting government forces, including in the city of Raqqa, the former de facto capital city of its self-styled caliphate.

“I don’t think the Abu Hudhayfa speech – in tone or substance – marks much of a departure for the Islamic State’s Syria strategy,” Kyle Orton, an independent Middle East analyst, told The New Arab.

“The spokesman hit themes – Al-Sharaa as a contemptible, faithless renegade and puppet of the West; his government an impious affront to Muslims; the need for relentless attritional warfare to bring it down – that have been standard in Al-Naba for quite some time,” Orton said. Al-Naba is IS’s propaganda newspaper.

“IS appears on the upswing militarily in Syria; by implication, their strategy is working,” Orton added. “But the rhetoric accompanying IS’s conduct has more of a stay-the-course feel to it than any sense of triumphalism for now.”

Aron Lund, a fellow with Century International and a senior analyst at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, also doesn’t think much of Abu Hudhayfa’s speech.

“These were familiar Islamic State talking points, and the most newsworthy thing was that we heard from this guy at all,” Lund told TNA. “But IS is definitely a problem in Syria, and it may be on its way to becoming a bigger problem,” he added.

“It’s Ramadan, and they need to say something to remind people that they’re alive,” Lund said. “After the upheaval in Syria’s northeast, it’s also an opportune moment for IS to broadcast its presence, both through ramped-up attacks and through media channels, like this speech. So that’s what they’re doing.”

Up to 20,000 IS affiliates are now thought to be at large in Syria after mass escapes from prison camps. [Getty]

Ryan Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at the risk intelligence company RANE, similarly sees a likely “element of narrative opportunism” on IS’s part.

“The US is pulling out very publicly and IS wants to make it clear that it will contest for the inevitable power vacuums of such a pullout,” Bohl told TNA.

“Meanwhile, IS is also trying to build the narrative that Sharaa remains a US/Turkish proxy rather than an Arab nationalist, another attempt to exploit the power vacuums emerging as the US withdraws from the country and reconstruction remains a slow process.”

Collapse of Al-Hol

The Syrian government’s offensive against the SDF in January predictably risked inadvertently empowering IS. For years, the SDF guarded the sprawling Al-Hol camp in Hasaka province, where thousands of IS sympathisers, family members, and children lived.

After the SDF abandoned the camp in January, the US promptly initiated an airlift operation, transferring more than “5,700 adult male” IS fighters to neighbouring Iraq between 21 January and 12 February.

The Syrian government closed Al-Hol shortly after. Subsequent reports surfaced indicating that 15,000 to 20,000 IS affiliates are now at large. A Syrian official confirmed that a “mass escape” from Al-Hol transpired after the government takeover, with at least 133 breaches discovered.

“The denouement at Al-Hol is worrying,” Orton said. “It is to be hoped that the US got the worst of the IS elements – i.e., the ‘high-value’ adult male detainees – out to the new facility in Iraq, but it remains quite opaque what actually happened.”

Most of the foreign detainees at Al-Hol were women and children, so presumably the US did not intend to transfer them out. “But it is little cause for comfort that this most radicalised element is now out and about in Syria,” Orton said.

RANE’s Bohl believes the US and Syria doubtlessly prioritised relocating the highest value IS members to Iraq. Citing the poor record of US prison management in the region, he wouldn’t be surprised if some of these individuals were allowed out by accident, given the chaotic and “hurried nature” of the operation.

“There’s a fair bit of unknowns right now as to the impact of the transfer on IS’s Syrian capabilities, and we will have to wait and see how effective IS now is with the SDF/US threat now substantially diminished,” Bohl said.

“It may be years before we fully know the impact of the transfer and how effective the US was in weakening IS as a resurgent force on its way out.”

Part of the Islamic State’s strategy is to try to delegitimise Ahmed Al-Sharaa as being beholden to Western and Turkish interests. [Getty]

The Syrian government has stated that it intends to handle the former IS detainees by placing them in communities with non-jihadists and keeping them under surveillance.

“This is not a reactive or contingent idea: people in and around the government told me this was their planned ‘solution’ for Al-Hol when I was in Syria a year ago,” Orton said. “I must say, I hoped they would never get to try it, and still feel the same way.”

Putting determined radicals in ordinary communities, however, is unlikely to dilute their extremism. “It seems far more likely the radicals will recruit others to their vision,” he said.

Strategy for regrowth

Century International’s Lund believes that IS’s “strategy for regrowth” in Syria is premised on two core assumptions.

Firstly, the group sees structural weakness in Sharaa’s government, but that is potentially a given in light of the delicate transition process Syria is undergoing following more than a decade of destruction and chaos.

Secondly, IS seemingly assumes that al-Sharaa is alienating a percentage of his supporters by partnering with the US and not imposing strict Islamic law. Lund noted that at its root, the new Syrian army remains dominated by “Islamist ex-rebel militias,” some of whom “share a past” with IS.

He emphasised that this doesn’t mean al-Sharaa has an “IS-friendly government,” citing his “solidly hostile” stance against the group, which he has fought since 2013.

“I think that’s true not just for al-Sharaa but for the vast majority of the new regime. Certainly, for its higher ranks,” Lund said. “But even so, you do have a lot of individuals within the new military whose background, family ties, or ideological leanings could intersect with the Islamic State.”

Some may not want to fight the group, he added, while some, under the right circumstances, may even be willing to assist it. Nevertheless, most of the interim president’s followers seem content with the government’s policy, for now.

“In the past, they were all about holy war and Sharia law, but now they argue that al-Sharaa is playing the long game, that stable governance is an Islamic value in itself, and that he needs to be given the time and space to succeed,” Lund said. “As time passes and internal tensions take their toll, however, maybe that honeymoon with hardline Islamism will end.”

The people that IS is trying to influence are a fringe group who could be drawn to promises of a more hardline ideology, but the vast majority of Syria’s Sunni Muslims despise the group.

“At this point, Syria is a deeply traumatised country with sky-high levels of intra-religious tension,” Lund said. “In any scenario, there’s going to be a minority within the Sunni Muslim population that can be drawn to IS’s brand of sectarian ultra-radicalism.”

IS’s long-term bet, he added, is that a minority of Sunni-sectarian hardliners will grow over time due to social discontent to become a recruiting base.

But as RANE’s Bohl noted, the conditions that enabled IS to swiftly conquer large parts of Syria and Iraq in the mid-2010s don’t exist today.

“Syria is nominally united under a single leader without Iraq’s messy parliamentary politics to upend policy, while the power vacuums are nowhere as strong as they were during the civil war for IS to exploit,” he said.

“IS does not have a strong opportunity to rebuild and reclaim territory as a result, but if there are missteps by Syria, the US, Turkey, and/or Israel that produce stronger power vacuums, this is what IS would need to return to the fore.”

IS’s remaining cells are a “local and regional danger,” in Bohl’s assessment. Still, he believes there “remains an outside chance” that the group successfully mounts attacks in Syria or elsewhere that “drive more robust responses”.

These could take the form of assassinations of high-profile leaders, targeting tourists, or attacks on Turkish or US forces, that might refocus attention on the group.

Lund similarly noted that IS is now “essentially an underground network” in Syria and Iraq, “restricted to subversion and terror tactics”. It no longer holds territory and can’t move around openly or attack its enemies at scale.

While its ability to rebuild networks in Syria and Iraq is a problem, IS does not present anywhere near the same threat today as it did in the past.

“Their so-called ‘caliphs’ keep leaving office at a pace and in a way that does not correspond to organisational best practice,” Lund said. “It’s not 2014 anymore.”

Paul Iddon is a freelance journalist based in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, who writes about Middle East affairs

Follow him on X: @pauliddon

Edited by Charlie Hoyle