Islamic State: the terror group's second act

Isis has carried out almost 700 attacks in Syria over the past year, according to one estimate

An Iraqi soldiers walks past a Islamic State logo inside a tunnel formerly used as a training facility by jihadist fighters near Mosul, in 2017
An Iraqi soldiers walks past a Islamic State logo inside a tunnel formerly used as a training facility by jihadist fighters near Mosul, in 2017
(Image credit: Ahmad Al-Rubaye /AFP / Getty Images)

On 20 March 2019, President Trump proudly brandished a sheet of paper before White House reporters, said Adrian Blomfield in The Daily Telegraph. On it were two maps of Syria. The first, swathed in red blotches, showed how much territory Islamic State had held in the country when he became president. The second, almost perfectly white map, showed what the jihadist group now held: just one tiny area near the town of Baghuz. And that, boasted Trump, would disappear very soon.

It did, in a matter of days; but last week's deadly ramming attack in New Orleans, by a man apparently inspired by the group, is a reminder that Isis is still far from eradicated. Indeed, analysts have been warning for months that the group is having something of a revival: according to one expert, it has carried out almost 700 attacks in Syria over the past year.

Despite the loss of its "caliphate" in Syria and Iraq, Isis remains a lethal threat, said Jason Burke in The Guardian. It has established new hubs in the Sahel region and eastern Africa, and its Afghan affiliate – known as Isis-Khorasan, or Isis-K – was responsible for the mass shooting in a Moscow concert hall last year that claimed the lives of at least 145 people.

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The group's ideas, meanwhile, continue to inspire a small number of disaffected or disturbed individuals in the West. There was reportedly a significant rise in thwarted Isis-inspired attacks in America last year – a trend attributed to the US authorities' failure to curb the spread of extremist Islamist propaganda online, and the "radicalising effects of the war in Gaza".