5. Within Islamic State's leadership, how formidable is the military command structure after many senior officers have been killed? Is it still capable of organizing serious ground offensives? How cohesive is the religious ruling structure headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, sthe o-called Caliph Ibrahim? How much conflict is there within the religious leadership? Al-Baghdadi is rarely heard from in audio messages and has never appeared again in public since his July 2014 sermon in a Mosul mosque. Is he still a charismatic leader capable of motivating deeply loyalty among new and veteran jihadists? A stalled operation is a permanent risk to the authority of al-Baghdadi and the sharia council.
6. How important is it to have contiguous territory and coherent fighting forces trying to overthrow governments? ISIS is frustrated in Iraq and under attack from several sides in Syria. The group is not expanding its contiguous territory, and, for ideological reasons, if core Islamic State is not expanding, it is failing. How significant are the pledges of allegiance of faraway jihadist groups? In Afghanistan, ISIS seems to have attracted some Taliban fighters, but the organizations still fight each other as well as the Kabul regime supported by the United States. It remains to be seen whether holding some territory in Afghanistan or elsewhere abroad would enhance core Islamic State in Syria and Iraq because they would always be under attack somewhere, no doubt in several places. A fragmented international structure would be even more fragile than the contiguous Ottoman Empire caliphate. ISIS may in fact be declining, from a threat to regimes into a beleaguered core area whose successes consist of terrorist bombings abroad.
7. How long will ISIS avoid attacks to take back its urban conquests in places such as Mosul, Raqqa, and Ramadi? Raqqa has already fallen under air attack, even though it sits within the group's core territory. Mosul and Ramadi are isolated, surrounded, even under siege, by Kurds, Baghdad, and Iranian proxy forces. Assaults to retake them are deterred mainly by the prospect of too much blood being spilled and large parts of the cities being left as ghost towns, as seen in Kobane. Lines of ISIS communication and resupply are threatened even if food and other supplies are let through to service the local population. ISIS fighters inside Mosul may number a thousand, and there are probably many fewer in Ramadi.
8. The last question concerns the Islamic State's vaunted success using social media as propaganda. Certainly the West's anti-jihadist social media campaign is basically futile, but Islamic State's propaganda success may be declining, in spite of its output. A Wall Street Journal report on Oct. 7 (page A11) notes that since mid-September, 14 videos and 17 articles have appeared trying to discredit the significance of the refugee flow to Europe. One of them uses a fiction concocted by the Communist German Democratic Republic to explain the Berlin Wall. The Wall, it said, was not built by the GDR to keep East Germans from leaving. It was built by the West to prevent its own citizens from fleeing to the Communists. The Islamic State video tells viewers the refugees are in fact Syrians moving from Damascus-controlled territory to the caliphate. There is no doubt that some young foreigners still arrive to ISIS territory on a mission, and others across the world are impressed by the jihadist mentality - some enough to commit lone-wolf attacks. But in the medium term, sheer quantity of propaganda may not be enough to replenish the ranks.
There's always the possibility that Islamic State's leadership is hiding its strength, reorganizing, and will break out sometime soon in a new military campaign. But many signs point to weaknesses throughout the apparatus and ideology. My thought is that al-Baghdadi and his cohort are very worried.
(AP photo)
