Sgt. Blake Hoffman and Pfc. Maciah Pray of the 4th Air Defense Artillery Regiment engage a drone with a Stinger missile during the May 2024 Eager Lion exercise in Jordan. Islamic State-claimed attacks in the Middle East have risen in the past year, including the drone attack on a U.S. base in Jordan that killed three soldiers and injured 40 others in January. (Duy Nguyen/U.S. Army)
The number of attacks claimed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is on pace to more than double from last year, indicating that the terrorist group is working to regain its strength, according to U.S. Central Command.
In the first six months of the year, ISIS has claimed 153 attacks in those two countries and is “attempting to reconstitute following several years of decreased capability,” CENTCOM said in a statement Tuesday.
The statement did not include data from 2023 for comparison.
Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command, presents an Army Achievement Medal with “C” Device to Spc. Dylan A. Green in December 2023, for his service as a forward area air defense and nighthawk operator, and for shooting down six drones. Islamic State-claimed attacks in Iraq and Syria are on pace to more than double those last year, according to CENTCOM. (Jeffrey Daniel/U.S. Army Reserve)
The announcement, 10 years after ISIS declared itself a caliphate and brutally ruled over territories it seized, follows testimony by CENTCOM commander Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla in March blaming a surge of ISIS assaults in both countries this year on a barrage of Iran-backed attacks on U.S. forces.
Those include a Jan. 28 drone assault on a U.S. base in Jordan that killed three soldiers and injured at least 40 others.
The attacks forced Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S.-led fight against ISIS, to “come off plan as we prioritized protecting our forces in Iraq and Syria,” Kurilla told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 7.
“The ensuing spike in ISIS attacks demonstrates the gravity of disruptions to the international effort to permanently defeat the group,” Kurilla said.
New Jersey National Guard soldiers sit during a farewell ceremony in Trenton, N.J., on Jan. 14, 2024, before deploying to U.S. Central Command’s area of operations. Islamic State-claimed attacks in Iraq and Syria are on pace to more than double those last year, according to CENTCOM. (Michael Schwenk/U.S. Army National Guard)
Since the U.S.-led coalition was formed in September 2014, it has seen success in eliminating ISIS’s grip on Iraq and Syria, although some cells remain.
Analysts also have pointed to worrisome indications that the group is resurging, particularly in central Syria. For example, ISIS militants conducted at least 215 attacks in Syria in 2023, a 168% increase over the total in 2022, the international nonprofit Counter Extremism Project said in a March report.
“After suffering significant losses in 2021 and 2022, ISIS took on a renewed aggressive posture in 2023 — not only through carrying out more attacks on military and civilian targets in Syria, but also by reintroducing tactics that have not been commonplace for several years,” Gregory Waters, an analyst for the group who authored the report, said in March.
U.S. soldiers work alongside service members from the Air Force, Marine Corps and German armed forces during an aerial gunnery exercise with AH-64 Apache helicopters in northern Iraq on July 2, 2024. Islamic State-claimed attacks in Iraq and Syria are on pace to more than double compared to last year, according to U.S. Central Command. (Bruce Daddis/U.S. Army)
Despite the recent increases, overall ISIS-claimed attacks trended downward since at least 2019, according to a March 20 report from The Washington Institute for Far East Policy.
Worldwide, ISIS claimed 1,121 attacks from March 2023 to March 2024, nearly 70% of which were outside Iraq and Syria, according to the report. By comparison, the group claimed 3,301 attacks from March 2019 to March 2020, of which about 35% were outside the two countries, the report shows.
The report concluded that changes to U.S. posture in the region “could have far-reaching implications for global counterterrorism efforts and regional security.”
Since January, there have been 196 U.S. and coalition member operations in Iraq and Syria, resulting in the deaths of 44 ISIS operatives and the detention of 166 others, CENTCOM said.
