On 20 March 2019, President Trump proudly brandished a sheet of paper before White House reporters, said Adrian Blomfield in The Daily Telegraph. On it were two maps of Syria. The first, swathed in red blotches, showed how much territory Islamic State had held in the country when he became president. The second, almost perfectly white map, showed what the jihadist group now held: just one tiny area near the town of Baghuz. And that, boasted Trump, would disappear very soon.
It did, in a matter of days; but last week’s deadly ramming attack in New Orleans, by a man apparently inspired by the group, is a reminder that Isis is still far from eradicated. Indeed, analysts have been warning for months that the group is having something of a revival: according to one expert, it has carried out almost 700 attacks in Syria over the past year.
Despite the loss of its “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, Isis remains a lethal threat, said Jason Burke in The Guardian. It has established new hubs in the Sahel region and eastern Africa, and its Afghan affiliate – known as Isis-Khorasan, or Isis-K – was responsible for the mass shooting in a Moscow concert hall last year that claimed the lives of at least 145 people.
The group’s ideas, meanwhile, continue to inspire a small number of disaffected or disturbed individuals in the West. There was reportedly a significant rise in thwarted Isis-inspired attacks in America last year – a trend attributed to the US authorities’ failure to curb the spread of extremist Islamist propaganda online, and the “radicalising effects of the war in Gaza“.
Governments have become more adept at heading off terrorist plots, said Eliot Wilson in The i Paper, but random vehicle attacks such as the one in New Orleans, or the one less than a fortnight earlier on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, pose a particular challenge. All lone-wolf attackers need in such cases is “determination and blood lust”, and there’s not much we can do to stop them short of pedestrianising all urban areas and banning public gatherings.
Preventing Isis from expanding its power bases would help curb its malign influence, said The Times. It will seek to exploit any political vacuum in Syria, where US-backed forces are currently holding thousands of Isis prisoners. Trump recently said of Syria: “This is not our fight. Let it play out.” But the incoming president may have to abandon that laissez-faire attitude in office. “Domestic security partly depends on global vigilance.” For everyone’s sake, “Isis must not be allowed a second act”.