With End of Islamic State Caliphate, U.S. Shifts to Long New Fight Ahead by Gordon Lubold, Warren P. Strobel and Nancy A. Youssef – Wall Street Journal
Focus will change from years of armed conflict to confrontation with dispersed, furtive insurgency.
The final defeat of the Islamic State extremist group’s self-declared caliphate marked an important battlefield victory in the fight against the terrorist network, but it also signaled a shift to a more difficult fight to come, U.S. military officials and experts said.
For U.S. counterterrorism strategy, the focus will move from years of armed conflict as the group held parts of Iraq and Syria to confrontation with a more dispersed and furtive insurgency, officials and analysts said. It also will mean devising ways to undercut its recruitment efforts and its appeal to opportunity-starved regions.
“There will still be an insurgent element out there that has intentionally gone into hiding and will try to reemerge,” said a U.S. military official. “It will be a difficult effort to find them and prevent their resurgence—in some ways as difficult as the elimination of the physical caliphate.”
Military officials and experts credit President Trump’s 2017 giving field commanders more leeway in executing operations with accelerating the fight begun by former President Obama against Islamic State and helping lead to the final elimination of the group’s land holdings.
But while Mr. Trump repeatedly has alluded to ending the U.S. mission in Syria, many of the officials and experts hope the U.S. public understands that the fight against Islamic State and global terrorism in general is not only continuing but becoming harder…