This piece first appeared in The Epoch Times Canada on September 13, 2024.
In the wake of yet another foiled ISIS-inspired terrorist plot, this one by a Canada-based Pakistani seeking to kill Jews in New York on the anniversary of last year’s Hamas attack in Israel, everyone is loudly proclaiming: “ISIS is back.”
And yet, this analysis is wrong.
For someone or something to “be back,” it has to have left in the first place. This return can be surprising or expected, but in the end it is of note. With respect to the ISIS terrorist group, it has not “resurged” because it never went away in the first place.
The group has been around since the mid-2010s, having morphed into its present form after starting out as an al-Qaeda affiliate, Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Interestingly, even al-Qaeda distanced itself from ISIS as the former saw the latter as too violent!
ISIS went on to create what it called the caliphate, spanning parts of Iraq, Syria, and Kurdish territory, and carried out unspeakable crimes over a half-decade, including beheadings, drownings, burning people alive in cages, mass executions, sexual slavery, and “markets” where women were bought and sold to ISIS “fighters.” The group went on to attempt genocide against the Yazidi religious sect, dismissing its members as “devil worshippers.”
Thanks to the United States and its coalition partners, the caliphate was dissolved by 2019. Many celebrated the end of these monstrous jihadis.
However, not only did ISIS not down arms in Iraq and Syria—today they regularly carry out attacks in both nations—but the group spawned a dozen or more “provinces” in West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa, Mozambique, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, India, and Central Asia. These “subsidiaries” have killed thousands over the last several years. In many ways, ISIS has surpassed al-Qaeda—which itself is not dead—on the list of the most lethal terrorist groups. The branch most cited today is ISIS-K or ISIS-Khorasan, operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan. ISIS-K is responsible for the attack on the Crocus City Hall music venue near Moscow in March.
It gets worse. Individuals or small cells “inspired” by ISIS have carried out attacks, some low-key in nature, in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium and were thwarted in a plan to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Austria. There was even a possible ISIS-inspired attack in Ireland, a country more used to IRA action than jihadi attacks.
We in Canada have also been targeted. In addition to the recent plot that was thwarted thanks to the RCMP and the FBI, we saw an attack in a Canadian Tire in Scarborough back in 2017 carried out by an ISIS wannabe, and one in Edmonton the same year. A few weeks ago, the RCMP arrested a father-son team, the Eldidis, who were allegedly preparing a mass casualty attack in Toronto. The dad was previously featured in an ISIS video which showed him “dismembering” a captive. This threat was only neutralized thanks to intelligence shared with Canadian agencies by France.
This flurry of ISIS attacks shows no signs of abating. The group will continue to metastasize and grow over the next few years (and possibly decades). Its presence in Africa especially is of great concern as the nations afflicted have had little to no success stopping these terrorists. The eviction of U.S., French, and other nations’ counter-terrorism forces by military juntas in Mali and Niger, and their replacement by Russia’s Africa Corps (formerly the Wagner Group), will most likely not stem the flow of attacks. Africa risks turning into what Afghanistan was to al-Qaeda in the 1990s: A terrorist haven that poses a direct threat to us in the West.
The Canadian government has to take this threat seriously and stop pretending that jihadi terrorism is yesterday’s problem, usurped by right-wing extremism. Immigration and border agencies and officials have to perform their due diligence to ensure that ISIS terrorists do not gain refugee/citizenship status.
Pretending that terrorism has peaked is a bad position to adopt. I realize that other threats are also on the rise—foreign interference/influence, espionage, cyberattacks, etc.—but terrorism is unique in that it captures the nation’s attention like no other act of violence.
ISIS will stay at the top of that threat pyramid for some time to come. It never left.
