Consider This from NPR - What's Next For ISIS After The Death Of Their Leader

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

Last Thursday morning, before dawn, U.S. special troops arrived at a house in Syria to capture the ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi alive. Two hours later, he was dead after detonating an explosive that also killed the lives of at least 13 others. The U.S. opted for a ground attack in an effort to protect civilians but the mission didn't go as planned. Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby explains some of the complications. And Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, explains what might happen now that the leader of ISIS is dead. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Before dawn last Thursday morning, American commandos set out on a secret mission in Syria. Their goal? To capture the leader of ISIS alive. And that, we figured, would require some doing, including the fact that he would resist or fight back. John Kirby is the Pentagon press secretary, and he told NPR about another complication in the mission to capture Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qureshi. The ISIS leader was hiding out in a building with civilians. There was an innocent family on the first floor of the building, a family that we believe didn't even know that the leader of ISIS was on the third floor of that house. And we wanted to make sure we could get them out safely.

The U.S. says those are some of the reasons it did not send a missile attack. Instead, special forces went in on the ground. The mission ended up taking two hours, more than twice the time it took for U.S. forces to attack Osama bin Laden's compound. I mean, you can understand, particularly that family on the first floor, probably scared, frightened. They didn't obviously know we were coming and coming in force. Kirby says there was a call out over a bullhorn in Arabic trying to convince everyone in the house to come out. Shortly after that... Mr. Abdullah blew himself up,

and then, of course, they had to enter the building. Abdullah is a nickname for al-Qurashi. Clearly, the mission did not go as planned. Some civilians were killed, and the U.S. says this was from the ISIS leader's explosives. A rescue team called the White Helmets recovered 13 bodies, many of them women and children. The Pentagon has not released any video of the attack, but Kirby says they are confident that al-Qurashi, the top ISIS leader, is dead.

This is an organization that wants to reconstitute. They want to grow. So we'll see how they try to react to this, to his loss. But we're going to assume they're going to try to reconstitute. They want to grow. So we'll see, you know, how they try to react to this, to his loss. But we're going to assume they're going to try to keep going. Consider this. ISIS is much bigger than any one person in command.

In fact, it's not clear how much of a command there even is. We'll look at where the terrorist organization goes from here and how much of a threat they still pose. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Monday, February 7th.

This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. When ISIS held the world's attention back in 2014, it controlled territory across Iraq and Syria the size of Great Britain. Now the group doesn't have any real claim to territory at all.

It's a very, very long way away from where it was then. Charles Lister is a senior fellow and director of the Syria and Countering Terrorism and Extremism programs at the Middle East Institute. But it is still a very capable insurgent organization. It has been conducting a persistent and consistent series of attacks against all kinds of actors across Syria and Iraq over the last two to three years. Last month, the group took over a portion of the biggest prison for ISIS prisoners in the world in northeast Syria. And that was certainly a big wake-up call for what it was capable of doing. I spoke with Lister about how ISIS may

evolve after the death of its leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qureshi. As an analyst of ISIS and someone who watches them day on day, the general impression we've got is that the leadership has kind of decentralized itself. It has disconnected somewhat from running the day-to-day operations of the insurgency. And it's done that for obvious reasons of survival, and in part because it doesn't control territory anymore. So they don't need that kind of strict command and control kind of structure. But interestingly, what we've heard from the U.S. government today is actually quite a significantly different picture, that allegedly Qureshi has been in day-to-day control, communication, not just with operatives in Syria

and Iraq, but across the world. It's hard to know how much of that is kind of optics to display on a big day for the U.S. government having achieved this success and how much of it is actually reality. It doesn't necessarily add up with what we've known until now, but that's certainly what we're being told. Do you think his death or or the death of any single leader for that matter, is likely to make a big difference in ISIS operations? So if you asked me that question back in 2014 and 15, when ISIS was at its kind of peak of territorial control, it was trying to be a state. It was presenting itself as a territorial entity. At that point, you really need a rigid and capable senior leadership.

That senior leadership will run everything day to day. But ISIS is not in that place today. And as far as I'm concerned, they don't need a rigid leadership structure. They don't need a senior leader to be commanding, you know, basic day to day operations as a kind of guerrilla insurgency. So no, ultimately, I don't think this is a big game changer. Certainly is a big blow to ISIS morale in Syria and Iraq, but also internationally. And that shouldn't be discounted. But I can't see it having a really significant impact on ISIS's sort of day-to-day operations and the challenges that that poses to actors

of all kinds on a local level. Is there an obvious successor waiting in the wings? That at the moment is relatively unknown, you know, for obvious reasons. It's a terrorist organization that's currently existing in the shadows. There's no sort of open source information about who the successor will be. But ISIS is a extremely kind of bureaucratic, an obsessively bureaucratic organization. It always has been.

So they'll undoubtedly have a line of succession in place, and there will undoubtedly have been a plan put in place for a scenario exactly like this. But as for a name, we don't know yet. Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. Now, it's worth pointing out that al-Qureshi's predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed in a similar U.S. military raid back in 2019. So the organization has already outlived him as it adopted a less centralized strategy.

The diehard frontline fighters who actually are still killing people on behalf of ISIS aren't taking instructions from a top-down hierarchy. Thanasis Kambanis is director of Century International, a center for international research and policy at the Century Foundation. They're operating on the ground with a great deal of autonomy, and no amount of decapitation strikes or even effective counterterrorism work is going to conclusively end or disrupt this group's ability to harm and kill people. So how do you fight a group that outlives its leaders and continues to change shape? That's what Kambanis spoke with NPR's Scott Simon about over the weekend.

We will note that you were one of a number of people who gave some kind of advice to the Biden campaign. Are there things besides military action that the world can do to try and fight ISIS? Yeah, I mean, I've written over many years now advice not taken by the U.S. government, including by this administration, that says if we don't invest in the peace after the counter-terrorist war, we're just going to see wave after wave of nihilist groups like ISIS coming up. Quick fixes that we're not interested in spending money on. One is rebuilding the cities that we bombed to smithereens in the counter-ISIS campaign from 2014 to 2017. The second is the tens of thousands of ISIS detainees who are in these ramshackle improvised

jails in Iraq and Syria. We won't even pay to get prisons built that are secure for the worst of the committed ISIS fighters who've been detained. A third non-emergency, but a sort of simmering root cause of the next insurgency is the hundreds of thousands of mostly Iraqis who continue to live in limbo because they sympathize with ISIS. They're left without IDs, without normalized status, without the ability to send their kids to school. And this is a lost generation of highly marginalized, somewhat militant, susceptible folks who we in the United States have taken no interest in politically or economically finding a way to treat, not as a, I mean, we can't reward people who maybe had bad ideas,

but we need to do something with this group of people if we don't want them to be the seeds of the next iteration of ISIS. And I have to ask you, Mr. Kambanis, what do you say to those Americans who say, you know, there are plenty of people in this country who need help and they've never done anything to try and hurt an American? Well, as we know, we keep getting sucked into international conflicts because when groups like ISIS end up cutting off the heads of Americans on television, we as a nation inevitably end up agreeing that we have to do something about them. terrible groups. But the question is, do we spend our money in a sustained non-military campaign to prevent groups like this from eventually harming Americans and American interests? Or do we do what we have historically done, which is ignore them for years or decades and then spend a far greater deal of money and blood and treasure in American lives, beating them back in a hot war.

Venasas Kambanis is director of Century International. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.