ISIS Is Fighting A Guerrilla War Against The Iraqi State

Soldiers from the Emergency Response Division, en elite unit of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, on the lookout for ISIS militants during a recent clearing operation west of the city of Tuz Khurmatu in Salahuddin. Photo: Simona Foltyn for PBS NewsHour

Simona Foltyn, The Intercept: The Underground Caliphate

ISIS Has Not Vanished. It Is Fighting a Guerrilla War Against the Iraqi State.

The knock came one night late last year, a persistent bang on the metal door. The family inside shuddered as the sound echoed through the sparsely furnished farmhouse. Officially, their village had been liberated from the so-called Islamic State in October 2017, along with the nearby town of Hawija. But the military campaign had been hasty. The militants had sought refuge in the nearby mountains, leaving Iraqi forces to sweep through the area unchallenged.

Now it was November, a month after ISIS had ostensibly been vanquished, and the militants were back. The elite Iraqi units that had fought ISIS on the battlefield were gone, and the forces who had replaced them were poorly trained and thinly spread across these vast, hilly areas, honeycombed with riverbeds and irrigation channels that offered the insurgents plenty of hideouts.

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Update: ISIS returns to Iraq, and a town confronts a new wave of terror (PBS News Hour).

WNU Editor: As long as the Iraqi state is weak .... which is a given in view of its deep sectarian divisions .... groups like ISIS are only going to thrive. Here is an easy prediction. This insurgency is going to go on for a very long time.

On a side note .... and a sign of where YouTube is .... PBS's video on the growth of ISIS has been banned.