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Despite being stripped of its areas of control in Syria and Iraq, ISIS can still carry out bloody attacks against civilian and military targets.
The remnants of the “ISIS” organization in Iraq claimed 100 attacks across the country during the month of August alone, according to an assessment issued by the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium (TRAC) published on Thursday.
Al-Ittihad said that the percentage of operations attributed to the extremist organization increased by 25 percent compared to July.
He stressed that the attacks were mainly concentrated in “areas previously considered liberated” from the presence of extremist groups.
The rise in attacks indicates a troubling trend in ISIS’s steady resurgence through a group of sleeper cells, which is of regional and global concern, despite its regional defeat in Iraq just over three years ago, according to Fox News.
Before his visit to Washington last month, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kazemi told the Associated Press that his country still needed the United States to combat the threat of a terrorist group, although the White House remained committed to reducing its presence in the country devastated by the conflict.
“In the end, we will still need cooperation and assistance at levels that may not require direct military and field support today,” Al-Kazemi said, emphasizing that cooperation “will reflect the changing nature of the terrorism threat, including ongoing training. and arms support “.
In neighboring Syria, where the city of Raqqa was the center of ISIS’s supposed “caliphate” until its official defeat was announced in March last year, groups of ISIS loyalists continue to launch deadly attacks.
Last Sunday, the Syrian Democratic Forces announced that four of its fighters had been killed by ISIS near the Dashisha area near the Iraqi border.
A day after the attack, ISIS claimed responsibility for another attack in Al-Tuwaimin, near the Iraqi border, that killed five SDF fighters, but this claim has not been confirmed.
The organization is still spreading into the vast Syrian Badia, which stretches from the eastern Homs countryside to the Iraqi borders, and where it launches attacks against Syrian regime forces.
Iraq had declared “victory” over the extremist organization in late 2017, after bloody battles for more than three years.
However, remnants of extremists are still able to launch attacks against security forces in remote areas in the north and west of the country.
Military leaders and experts have always warned that defeating the organization and stripping it of its areas of control does not mean its ultimate elimination.
