Isis loss of ‘caliphate’ could fuel terror attacks abroad

In the days before its gunmen began to rampage in France, Isis had lost control of the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar and a road linking its two strongholds of Raqqa and Mosul, the most damaging in a string of military and propaganda setbacks for the group.

A drone had killed its “executioner”, Jihadi John. Syrian government troops had broken the group’s year-long siege of a key air base and Iraqi government forces were massing to retake Ramadi. US bombers were targeting the oil tankers that are a key source of revenue, setting up to 300 ablaze.

There was no doubt then that the group was under serious military pressure in its Iraqi and Syrian heartland when its foot soldiers began a killing spree across Paris, in both a dramatic show of strength and a potentially risky change of strategy for a group whose focus had always been local.

Despite its taste for taunting the west with atrocity videos or threatening massacres abroad, until the Paris attacks Isis had paid attention to the areas where it holds territory, the “caliphate” statelet at the heart of the group’s vision and propaganda.

“Perhaps the most important element of [the Isis] model of jihad, and I would clarify by saying that this may be coming into question following attacks in Paris, is that its inherent strategy is local,” Charles Lister, author of The Syrian Jihad: Evolution of the Insurgency, told a conference last week.

“Their entire focus is on shaping local conditions to gain influence, leverage and then control and then … consolidating that control.”

The group’s ability to sweep through new territory was key to both financing conflict on the ground in Syria and Iraq and feeding a sophisticated propaganda machine. Its claims to religious authority were bolstered, in the eyes of supporters, by dramatic military victories against forces that were far stronger and better equipped. Its slick videos, magazines and social media presence drew foreign recruits and intimidated those it ruled and those it fought. As a “state”, it could enslave women it deemed infidel and win female recruits from abroad, offering fighters sex and marriage, which rivals such as al-Qaida could promise only in the afterlife.