(quietly tense electronic music)
- [Narrator] This video released by the Pentagon
shows a raid on the compound
of the Islamic State's ideological leader and founder,
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
It resulted in his death
and marked one of the biggest defeats
for the militant group known as ISIS.
- He died after running into a dead end tunnel,
whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.
- [Narrator] His successor was announced just days later.
(explosions rumbling)
That was not the first major loss ISIS had suffered.
- This is all ISIS.
Now, on the bottom, that's as of today, this is ISIS.
There's none, the caliphate is gone as of tonight.
(crowd cheering)
- That was a massive setback (gunfire rattling)
for the physical caliphate that had for years
spread its brutal regime of terror across large areas
of Iraq and Syria. (group shouting)
But as officials at the time warned,
that wasn't the end of the militant group.
- This is not the end of the fight against ISIS.
ISIS still lives on in various cells
and in the minds of many of the people
in the areas that we've liberated.
(women shouting)
- What that victory did not do
was destroy ISIS as a military force.
- [Narrator] Jennifer Cafarella
is a Syria and ISIS specialist
and one of the author's of "ISIS's Second Comeback."
It's an assessment that uses declassified information
and research to develop a picture
of the next ISIS resurgence.
- ISIS had already dispersed into populated areas
as well as ungoverned spaces like the Syrian desert
in central Syria to regroup and return
to an offensive campaign as an insurgency.
(explosion rumbling) (muffled group chattering)
- [Narrator] Following the defeat of the physical caliphate
was a string of attacks, (muffled group chattering)
several in Afghanistan,
including one on a government building that killed seven,
but the biggest of the attacks
was the so-called Easter Bombings in Sri Lanka,
where a series of blasts killed more than 300 people.
Just a few days after that,
there was a call from its now-deceased leader
to redouble efforts and further
the extremist group's cause around the world.
- So we saw several messages from Baghdadi and others
really urging people to continue,
promising the return of some form of the Islamic State.
We started hearing about attacks being inspired.
We heard about funding going to places like Afghanistan
to sort of expand the caliphate in that way.
(tense orchestral music)
(man shouting in foreign language)
- [Narrator] But as the group continued
to spread its ideology globally,
a decision by President Trump to pull U.S. forces
out of Syria shocked the region,
intensifying the fear of a physical ISIS resurgence.
- The worst thing any commander in chief
could do to the soldiers is to give back to the enemy
land taken through blood sacrifice.
- [Narrator] As the U.S. left,
Turkey and Turkish-backed forces advanced into Syria,
seizing territory held by Kurdish forces,
those same Kurdish forces guarding some prison camps
and detention centers holding ISIS prisoners
and family members linked to Islamic State.
According to the Syrian Democratic Forces or SDF,
there are just over 12,000 ISIS fighters in detention,
including more than 2000 foreign fighters,
and estimates from U.S. forces on the ground
say there are tens of thousands of ISIS family members
scattered across internally displaced people camps or IDPs.
- What you can see here in red
are facilities from which ISIS has succeeded
or attempted to break out family members
and fighters from prisons.
Now, those breakouts thus far are not highly coordinated,
so we're talking about riots
and small levels of ISIS members paying bribes, essentially,
to guards so that they can escape
or be smuggled out of these facilities.
- [Narrator] While Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
assured Trump he would secure the prisons
inside the proposed safe zone,
some of the most important ones are located outside of that,
and it's not just the prisons under threat.
The instability in Syria is a major concern
for neighboring Iraq.
- [Jennifer] On both sides,
in Syria here and on the Iraqi side,
this is ungoverned desert.
Now, there are small pockets of the border, essentially,
that the Iraqis are securing,
but the rest of this is essentially desert
and, therefore, ISIS can traverse it.
- [Narrator] There are also concerns that the other players
in the region involved don't have any interest
in keeping ISIS at bay.
- The U.S. withdrawal from northeast Syria
creates a security vacuum,
and multiple actors are now going to compete
with military force to fill that vacuum.
All of the other actors in this region
are fighting in Syria for different goals
that they prioritize
far and above beyond the threat from ISIS,
and frankly, that includes the Kurds.
We've accelerated, basically, the disintegration
of the unity of effort against ISIS
that only the United States was able to create.
(pensive mallet percussion music)
- [Narrator] But how concerned
should we be with these threats,
and what might an ISIS resurgence look like?
- What one has to watch for is how they sort of try
to reconstitute or rebuild or rebrand themselves
in a way such that they have learned from those lessons
and are able to endure longer as a caliphate
than they were the first time.
I don't have the imagination to tell you
how that's gonna go, but their ideology remains
a powerful one and one that inspires a lot of people
and one that is expansive and worldwide.
(group chattering)
- The global ISIS expansion
has included adding new formal provinces
to the ISIS structure.
We've seen a redoubling of that ISIS effort
to expand in Northern Africa
and now an expansion farther south to the DRC
and other Central African states.
We've simultaneously seen an expansion
in the East Asia regions.
ISIS has had a province in Afghanistan
since early in the caliphate
but has now expanded to include a separate province
in Pakistan and a separate province in India.
These ISIS provinces are in addition
to what ISIS calls the East Asia Province
based in the Philippines
where ISIS had achieved a major success in 2017,
seizing the provincial capital of Marawi
and defending it against the Philippine Security Forces
for a number of weeks.
- We've never had a terror group resurrect itself
in the same form.
These groups have a way of metastasizing
and reconstituting themselves
in ways that perhaps we don't always
have the imagination to foresee.
They still have millions of dollars in revenue,
not nearly to the levels that they did at their peak.
When we think about the future of ISIS,
I think it's really important to not be confined
to that box of thinking of what it was in 2014, 2015, 2016
or to think of collapse strictly in the form
of the physical caliphate, because that virtual caliphate
it is as important and arguably will be key
to however it reconstitutes itself if it's able to.
(pensive orchestral music)