Analysis: Times have never been tougher for those who want to inform on the terrorists or chronicle their deeds. That isn’t a sign of a group under mortal strain

His tone was flatter, his physique less muscled, but his intent as menacing as his predecessor. The debut of what appears to be a new British-accented jihadi in an Islamic State propaganda film seemed tailored to signal business as usual for the terror group, two months after its foreboding former face, Mohammed Emwazi, was killed.

A lot has happened since then; the coordinated attacks in Paris, three mass bombings in southern Turkey, apparent near-misses in Munich and Brussels, a downed Russian passenger jet in the Sinai and heightened anxiety from Madrid to Istanbul.

But this latest video was aimed directly at the UK. The message was simple: David Cameron’s decision to bomb Isis targets in Syria had made Britain more of a target. And that whenever one British Isis frontman was killed, another was ready to take his place.



The identity of the new jihadi, filmed purportedly killing a captive clad in orange, will likely be quickly established by British security services who, 18 months after Emwazi first appeared as Jihadi John, have compiled exhaustive lists of citizens who have travelled to Iraq and Syria.

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Isis is now more of a known quantity than it was during the series of high-definition horror shows that horrified millions and focused global attention on the organisation.

Isis’s British legion has been slowly picked off, through a combination of British military drone strikes, such as those that killed Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin in August, or US strikes, such as the one that killed Junaid Hussain a month later, or a litany of attacks by fighter jets across western Iraq and eastern Syria.

One of Emwazi’s associates, Aine Lesley Davis, was captured in Istanbul days after he was killed. In early December, a British-educated Bangladeshi national, Siful Haque Sujan, a lynchpin of the group’s hacking unit, was also killed by a US drone strike.

However, a key theme of the latest video, and of Isis messaging, is that targeted victories will not win the war. And, to that end, the terror group is right. Isis has endured serious losses in the past three months, not just in personnel but in the area it can claim to own – the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar and central city of Ramadi have slipped from its grasp, as has much of the Turkish border, and it no longer controls the main road between its two most important hubs, Raqqa and Mosul.

That said, large Sunni populations in substantial parts of Syria and Iraq remain in its custody. Isis’s message to them, and to the broader Sunni Muslim world, is that it is defying injustice and aggression to champion their cause when the regional political system and global powers have failed to do so.

Coupled with a claim to be restoring the lost glories of Islam and to defy an ascendant Iran, substantial numbers of people find the messages alluring – especially in the absence of a credible political process that could begin to restore more than 12 years of lost power and influence in the centre of the region.

The group’s achievements in less than three years remain shocking, even if it is on the back foot militarily. Swaths of two ailing states remain under its control, almost half the population of Syria has been displaced and almost 1 million Syrians and Iraqis have joined the refugee route to Europe. Isis is known to want to exploit the new paths to previously difficult-to-reach places and has boasted of hiding a small number of its members among the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to the European Union.

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Its focus on launching attacks in Europe has never been more determined. This is partly to avenge the attacks being aimed at it by 14 different air forces, including France and Britain, but also because its senior leadership has moved to a new phase in the group’s evolution: exporting chaos to its nearest enemies especially. It has repeatedly nominated Rome, Paris – and London – as likely targets.

There was a final, familiar message to the latest video – that its enemies await a gruesome fate. The five men apparently murdered are alleged to have provided information to unnamed groups in Turkey, some of which helped kill Isis’s second in command, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, in July.

Despite all the attention, Isis is known to have increased its counter-surveillance capacity, maintaining a highly skilled IT team, as well as assassination cells in southern Turkey that have twice since November killed citizen journalists who had reported on life in Raqqa.

Times have never been tougher for those who want to inform on Isis, or chronicle its deeds. That is not the sign of an organisation under mortal strain.