What the Paris attack has taught us about ISIS

In Italy, one of the world&#039;s many remembrances of the Paris terrorist attacks

(Image credit: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)

published 16 November 2015

On Friday, the same day at least eight men apparently aligned with Islamic State murdered at least 132 people in a Paris terrorist attack, ISIS lost control of Sinjar, a key Iraqi town on the road connecting ISIS's headquarters in Raqqa, Syria, to its strongholds in Mosul, Iraq. U.S.-led coalition airstrikes killed more than 200 ISIS fighters as they fled the city, a Pentagon official tells The Wall Street Journal. So on the one hand, ISIS is losing ground in Iraq and Syria, but on the other, it's carrying out more deadly attacks abroad, purportedly including bombings in Lebanon and Turkey and of a Russian passenger plane in Egypt.

Those developments are related, a self-identified ISIS defector tells Michael Weiss at The Daily Beast. Weiss met in Istanbul with a man he calls Abu Khaled, who says he helped train ISIS security forces, including foreign fighters from all over. Whereas foreign ISIS recruits used to hand over the passports to the ISIS "Human Resources" bureaucracy, Abu Khaled explained to Weiss, now "ISIS is increasingly restrictive and controlling as it has begun to lose battles, some of them at tremendous cost."

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In September of last year, at the apogee of ISIS's foreign recruitment surge, [Abu Khaled] says the influx of foreigners amazed even those welcoming them in. "We had like 3,000 foreign fighters who arrived every day to join ISIS. I mean, every day. And now we don't have even like 50 or 60." This sudden shortfall has led to a careful rethinking by ISIS high command of how inhabitants outside of Syria and Iraq can best serve the cause. "The most important thing," Abu Khaled said, "is that they are trying to make sleeper cells all over the world." The ISIS leadership has "asked people to stay in their countries and fight there, kill citizens, blow up buildings, whatever they can do. You don't have to come." [The Daily Beast]

That poses a big challenge to to Western intelligence services, and a quandary for policymakers. ISIS is able to plan these attacks because it has a "caliphate," Thomas Hegghammer at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment tells The Wall Street Journal. "Having a safe haven is the biggest force multiplier that a group can have, it gives them space and time to plan and to accumulate resources for external operations."

But ISIS may have already planted an unknown number of seeds outside Syria and Iraq, adds former CIA official Hank Crumpton: "With an enemy that has developed a proto-state in the heart of the Middle East with such proximity to Europe and so many foreign fighters, including those from Europe, it is just really a matter of time before something like this happens even with good, or even great, intelligence." Read more of Weiss' interview with "ISIS spy" Abu Khaled at The Daily Beast.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.

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