Thread by @hxhassan

How the Islamic State’s next chapter will be focused on growing roots & entrenching regional presence in ways it couldn’t at its zenith, when it focused on defending areas & lashing out through international terror. My thoughts in @thesundaytimes:

thetimes.co.uk/article/insurg…

If the clock could be turned back, Isis would do what it did in 2014. Its ideology is unlikely to transform substantially, although tactics might be tweaked a bit. Much of what it does will be defined by its attempts to assert itself as the leader of global jihad in lieu of AQ 1/

.. but we could easily identity almost exactly how it'll behave in the next years, and what its growth prospects are.

For example, I wrote years ago about how it'll evolve to what it is today, even as many (in the Coalition) thought differently.

The most important aspect to watch is how, paradoxically, Isis will be more able to entrench itself regionally as it turns to a strategy it executed so well in Iraq, and then in Syria and elsewhere. This is its comfort zone, not when it turned international in 2014 & lashed out.

After ISIS’s loss of its core caliphate in Iraq & Syria, my best guess about its future is a “happy medium” between ISIS in 2014 (conquering Rome etc) & ISIS before 2011 (Iraq-focused). In other words, it‘ll be less global but more focused on building & growing regional reach...

That’ll be a strategic & long-term change, and future ISIS will stabilize along those lines. That won’t be temporary and post-defeat interim change. With American tendencies to withdraw from the region, this strategy has an increased chance of success.

As I explained in the new article above, Isis foreign affiliates started to look more like Isis than move away from it. Isis anticipated how critical it was to streamline their operations & tighten its control over them. Sinai, Yemen & Khorassan were noticeably changing since ‘16