Getty In the Arena ISIL Is Winning Fourteen years after terror struck the U.S., our strategy to defeat terrorism is failing.

Bruce Hoffman is director of Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies and a senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. He was also a commissioner on the 9/11 Review Commission and a lead author of its report. His most recent books are The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama bin Laden’s Death and Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947.

At the tenth anniversary of 9/11, it seemed like we had terrorism on the run; Osama bin Laden was dead, the Taliban was defeated and officials like CIA director Leon Panetta had proclaimed al Qaeda all but finished. But as we mark on Friday the 14th anniversary of the devastating attacks on the United States, it’s time to admit that the terrorists—at least one specific branch of terrorists—are now winning. And it’s time to admit that our response to the so-called Islamic State has been an abject failure.

Last year, fighters belonging to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a group once part of the same organization responsible for the 9/11 attacks stormed into Iraq, conquered half that country, declared itself both a state and a Caliphate and set about to slaughter and enslave thousands of Christians, Shi’a, and members of Islamic minority sects. Fifteen months later, ISIL’s influence has spread far beyond the Levant and Mesopotamia. A thousand foreign recruits converge monthly on its operational cynosure. Hailing from some fifty countries they exceed by a factor of ten the average monthly flow of foreign fighters to Iraq at even the height of the war there a decade ago.


ISIL’s international cadre has also far exceeded the number that gravitated to Afghanistan during and the 1980s and 1990s. That growth creates the same conditions—but on a far vaster magnitude—that led to al Qaeda’s rise and the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., on 9/11.

One of the more revealing measures of terrorism lethality is the number of incidents that kill more than one hundred persons at one time—a surprisingly rare occurrence. Throughout the entirety of the twentieth century, for example, a total of only fourteen terrorist attacks did so. Last year, however, twice as many accomplished the same feat—the majority of which were perpetrated by either ISIL or one its branches.

The temptation to dismiss these developments as primarily “local” phenomena—confined to the perennially violent, unstable Middle East—is further belied both by the growing number of ISIL branches or “provinces” and its continued efforts to radicalize a worldwide stable of “stay-behind” amateurs, whom the group encourages to carry out low-level, lethal attacks in their respective homelands. To date, ISIL has established bases in at least a half-dozen countries: stretching from West and North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula and from the Sinai to South Asia and the Caucasus. And, over the past year alone, ISIL-inspired homegrown attacks have occurred in the U.S., Australia, Canada, France and Belgium.

“This is sort of the new normal,” FBI Director James Comey observed following the most recent July 4th holiday, after ten persons were arrested and charged in connection with a variety of ISIL-inspired plots. They included three New York men, who are believed to have been planning to mount attacks using improvised explosive devices similar to those used in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that killed three persons and wounded over 200 others. “If you imagine a nationwide haystack,” Comey described the challenge facing U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, “we are trying to find needles in that haystack.”

Confronted by an increasingly geographically diffuse and demographically diverse threat, it is clear that our current strategy is a failure. This was made clear by a poll taken among the attendees of last spring’s prestigious Senior Conference at the U.S. Military Academy. These persons included America’s top military commanders, senior government officials, distinguished scholars, prominent aid workers and journalists. A startling 97 percent agreed that the U.S. is losing the war against ISIL. And the geopolitical situation has only deteriorated since then. Even as ISIL has lost ground in northern Syria, it has conquered new territory in the south and in the central desert zone east of Homs. This was demonstrated only days ago when ISIL captured the last major Syrian government-held oilfield, the Jazal facility just outside Palmyra. Even more alarming is the spread since March of ISIL terrorism to Yemen, where an ongoing series of bombings targeting Shi’a mosques to date have killed or wounded more than 500 people.

It’s obvious why those closest to the threat think we’re losing: A depressing pattern has established itself over the past four years whereby we continue to decapitate their leadership and they nonetheless continue to seize more territory; we downsize our military, while the flow of recruits into their ranks continues unabated; our intelligence collection capabilities are diminished, but they more effectively exploit digital and social media to ensure new sources of support and recruits.

Just days ago, for instance, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, explained how the intelligence disclosures made by Edward Snowden had impacted America’s counterterrorism capabilities. Citing the closure of the National Security Agency’s MYSTIC program in Afghanistan, which monitored mobile-phone conversations throughout that country, Clapper called it “the single most important source of force protection and warning for our people in Afghanistan.” FBI Director Comey, meanwhile, has often cited the “going dark phenomenon”: whereby outdated legislation coupled with technological advances in encryption have eroded law enforcement’s ability to obtain electronic information and evidence pursuant to court orders and warrants.

The cumulative effect has been that we’ve stood on the sidelines as a new, more pernicious hybrid threat has emerged—a threat that erodes any meaningful distinction between terrorism, insurgency and limited conventional warfare. ISIL is something the world has never seen before. During the summer of 2014, for example, it launched a battalion-sized assault and defeated 30,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers. As the defenders fled, they left behind approximately three military divisions’ worth of equipment, including American-made Humvees and M1 Abrams tanks, totaling tens of millions of dollars. ISIL had already seized large stockpiles of weapons, equipment and cash while fighting in Syria and has recently employed chemical weapons on several occasions. The size, weapons and tactics of ISIL forces—combined with their ability to seize and hold terrain—are arguably unique in the annals of terrorism. Accordingly, ISIL, and even al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, are now as capable (if not more so) than the militaries of regional nation-states. Like their government counterparts, these hybrid forces hold territory, control populations, conduct business and enforce laws.

Faced with these formidable challenges on the fourteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we desperately need a new strategy. It must start with the recognition that ISIL’s appeal will not diminish nor its allure end until this movement is militarily defeated and pushed out of Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces are patently incapable of this task. And, our de facto alliance with Iran and domestic Shi’a militias has heightened rather than assuaged Sunni fears of encirclement and furnished ISIL’s propagandists with a powerful narrative that more tightly binds the fate of indigenous populations to the protection the Islamic State provides.

The inadequacy of the embryonic U.S. efforts to train Syrian rebels was also laid bare last month when terrorists loyal to al Qaeda kidnapped the commander of Division 30, the American-backed indigenous force, along with six other senior officers. The al Qaeda fighters then attacked the unit’s headquarters, killing or wounding nearly half of the remaining men—effectively negating U.S. hopes that the unit would be a model for future training initiatives.

We have to accept that Iraq has ceased to exist as a viable federal union and has now permanently splintered into Sunni, Shi’a and Kurdish enclaves. In these circumstances, our best option is to back the only reliable and militarily capable partners we have there—the Kurds. To date, both the Kurdish Peshmerga and YPG or People’s Protection Unit, its Syrian counterparts, are the only local forces who have demonstrated any effective ability to counter ISIL. Yet, American support of both is hamstrung by a misplaced deference to Turkey’s priorities—a NATO ally who has often proven as unhelpful in the war on terrorism in the Levant as Pakistan has been in South Asia.

Second, we have to finally ask why, after a decade and a half, we do not have even one case of host nation counterterrorist training that is an unambiguous success story? Whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali or Yemen our efforts to build partner capacity have all foundered. In each, terrorist numbers have grown faster than we could effectively train indigenous security forces, their control over territory expanded while governmental sovereignty contracted, and their operational effectiveness appreciably outpaced that of their government opponents. A complete overhaul of our training and resourcing of foreign partners is required if we are to prevent the further spread of ISIL branches.

Finally, a concerted effort is needed to undermine the logistical infrastructure that supports and sustains terrorism. ISIL could never have accumulated the power it currently wields without a capacity to ensure the continued flow of recruits into its ranks and money into its coffers. Many of the successful financial initiatives that have proven so successful against al Qaeda over the past decade and a half are completely irrelevant to ISIL, given that only an estimated 5 percent of its revenue comes from charities or philanthropic donations.

Unlike most terrorist groups, ISIL actually possesses its own means of income generation and financing. ISIL controls oil fields in the regions it governs that yield an estimated revenue of up to $2 million per day. U.S. and coalition airstrikes have reportedly reduced ISIL’s income from oil and petroleum products significantly but not critically. Indeed, ISIL reportedly continues to sell oil, natural gas, and electricity on the black and grey markets using a complex network to smuggle contraband supplies to surrounding states. A new approach is thus required to address terrorist financing patterns that have adapted and adjusted to previously effective government countermeasures. An essential prerequisite to achieving this should focus on cutting ISIL off from the underhanded middle-men and nefarious brokers who routinely facilitate the sale and transfer of ISIL fuel products and other goods to surrounding countries—many of whom are citizens of close U.S. regional allies.

During the twentieth century, we believed that publicity was the oxygen that breathed life into terrorism. Today, it is terrorist access to both physical and virtual sanctuaries and safe havens—and those protections are sadly increasing for ISIL rather than contracting. Rolling back ISIL from Iraq is a critical first step in reversing this process and countering a threat that is becoming more entrenched and intractable.

