According to UN and US officials, the Islamic State has shown new vitality in Syria, attracting fighter jets, increasing attacks and adding to the volatility of the country that has still shaking since President Bashar al-Assad’s collapse.
The group isn’t as strong as a decade ago, when it ruled eastern Syria and most of northern Iraq, but experts say the Islamic state can find a way to free thousands of hardened fighter jets housed in prisons protected by US-backed Syrian Kurdish forces.
The revival of a serious Islamic state will undermine the unusual moment when Syria appears to have an opportunity to move beyond its brutal dictatorship. However, it also echoed more widely and allowed for instability to spread in the Middle East. Extremist groups once used Syria as their base to plan attacks on European neighbours and even overseas.
9,000 to 10,000 Islamic state fighter jets and around 40,000 families are being detained in northeastern Syria. Their escape not only adds to the group’s numbers, but also offers a propaganda coup.
“The crown jewels of the Islamic State are still prisons and camps,” said Colin Clark, director of research at the global intelligence agency and security company, Soo Fan Group.
“That’s where there are fighters who are experienced and suffering from combat,” he said. “The value of pure propaganda when those prisons are open, in addition to the muscles you add to the group” will help the group’s recruitment efforts for months.
Last month, a US intelligence reporting official presented to Congress with the annual global threat assessment, concluded that the Islamic State would misuse the end of the Assad government to free prisoners and revive its ability to plot and execute attacks.
The US announced later last year that it had roughly doubled the number of Syrian ground troops to 2,000, and it appears that many strikes in the Syrian desert in the past few months have curtailed the immediate threat.
But President Trump has expressed deep skepticism about keeping US troops within the country, and is wary of experts who say the confluence of other developments in Syria could make it easier for Islamic states to register further.
The US hopes that the new Syrian government, led by former al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Taharil al-Sham, will become partners in the revived Islamic state. The group was acting on the intelligence provided by the US to disrupt eight Islamic state plots in Damascus, according to two senior military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate operations.
However, the sectarian violence in which hundreds of civilians were killed last month shows the government’s lack of control over some troops under its command, and it is unclear how much bandwidth it will have to fight the Islamic state.
The Islamic State, a Sunni Muslim rebellion group, began with al-Qaeda in Iraq and was defeated by local militias and American troops. The fighter rebranded as an Islamic state, exploiting the chaos of Syrian civil war, grabbed a vast territory belt and returned to Iraq.
It gained notoriety for its lure, sexual enslavement and public executions, and coordinated or inspired a series of terrorist attacks across Europe. The group was primarily routed over five years ago by a combination of Kurdish-led Syrian democratic and US military forces in northeastern Syria. However, by early 2024, the Assad regime was increasingly on defense. Its Iran and Russian allies were stretched elsewhere by conflict. And the Syrian Kurds were forced to deflect their troops to fight the Turkish attacks.
But while it no longer holds many territories, the Islamic State is still spreading its radical ideology through its secret cells and regional affiliates outside Syria and outside online. Last year, the group was behind massive attacks in Iran, Russia and Pakistan.
In Syria, the group charged 294 attacks in 2023, according to a US Department of Defense official who spoke anonymously to discuss information that has not yet been published.
Human rights groups and US military officials say attacks so far appear to be slower this year — partly due to the recent US bombing campaign targeting Islamic state fighters — but it’s still relatively early in the year, and the situation lies on the edge of the knife.
Aaron Zerin, a Washington Institute fellow who has been tracking the activities and propaganda of Muslim groups for over 15 years, said the anxiety the new government faces from the wreckage of the Assad regime and Turkey’s invasion of Syria is the biggest challenge right now. However, he warned that the Islamic state added yet another threat.
“We’re going to change the big attacks in Damascus on foreigners and foreigners and how everyone sees it, so we need to be careful,” he said.
Concerns over the possibility of prison escape by detainees in Islamic states have been heightened by ongoing violence in the northeast. Detention centres in northeastern Syria are protected by Kurdish-led fighters, a Syrian democrat who helps protect nearby camps that house families of the Islamic State. However, these forces are distracted by attacks from militias backed by Türkiye.
Turkish authorities see the Kurdish-led fighter jets as the Syrian branch of Turkish Kurdish separatists who fought forty years with the Turkish government. Turkey considers them to be terrorists.
Prisons have already proven to be a concern. In 2022, nearly 400 Islamic State-related prisoners fled during an Islamic State attack at a prison in Hasaka city. At the time, US special operations forces helped Syrian Democratic forces control the situation.
Since then, the US intelligence agency on potential prison violations has helped Syrian Democrats disrupt other conspiracies before they happen, one of the top US officials said.
In Alhor, the largest camp where women and children from the Islamic State have been detained for years, extremist groups have tested boundaries. In a recent report, the UN Commission said that the chaos surrounding Al-Assad’s collapse allowed fighters from several Islamic states to flee the camp, but how many were not clear.
If Syrian Kurds become weakened, “it’s definitely going to create a vacuum,” said Kawahassan, an Iraqi analyst and non-resident fellow at the Stimson Centre, a nonpartisan organization in Washington. “And only the Islamic state is thriving in a vacuum.”
