What the Paris attack has taught us about ISIS

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."

He told Weiss that ISIS shifted tactics after losing the battle for Kobani, where Kurdish fighters backed by U.S. air support killed 4,000 to 5,000 mostly non-Syrian militants. Before Kobani, Weiss said, "the caliphate had an aura of invincibility, and people from around the world were rushing to envelop themselves in the black flag of messianic victory." After Kobani, things changed:

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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.