Even as the ISIS terrorist attack in Brussels seized the world’s attention, the terrorist group was suffering steady losses of territory it had recently captured in Syria and Iraq while its ranking leadership and caches of military supplies were being decimated by U.S. and Russian bombing runs. Plainly, a new military calculus has taken hold on the international scene with a radically new indicia of power.
The ability of relatively marginal groups bent on destruction to project their power is unprecedented. It behooves the Western world to radically refine its intelligence gathering and analysis capacities so as not to miss the implications of even the minutest pieces of relevant information. Concomitantly, thorough reevaluations of approaches to civil liberties in the critical search for signs of terrorist plotting seem logical and inevitable.
The Pentagon recently reported that U.S. Special Operations forces in Syria had killed a top Islamic State commander, Abd al-Rahman Mustafa asl-Qaduli, the latest critical loss for ISIS in a long campaign aimed at eviscerating the group’s senior leadership echelons. Mr. Qaduli was described by Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter as the chief ISIS financier. In announcing his death, Mr. Carter repeated a theme he has sounded for about three months now – that military pressure on ISIS was steadily gaining momentum and that the group was losing its leaders, soldiers, money, and areas it had come to control since the quest to carve out a caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq had begun.
Mr. Carter said:
We are systematically eliminating [Islamic State’s] cabinet…. Striking leadership is necessary but…it’s far from sufficient. Leaders can be replaced. However, these leaders have been around for a long time. They are senior, they’re experienced, and so eliminating them is an important objective….
Yet Mr. Carter’s comments came three days before Islamic State claimed responsibility for killing dozens of people in terrorist attacks in Brussels. Brian Fishman, a terrorism expert at Washington’s New America Foundation, says this pattern “is going to last quite a while. It’s absolutely true these guys have lost territory in Syria and Iraq. But you don’t need to control a state that size in order to train people to successfully carry out terrorist attacks in Europe.”
It appears that intelligence efforts are lagging behind the military victories in the battle against ISIS. Reports keep surfacing about the failure of authorities to connect the dots of information already available. Indeed, Belgian officials concede they had information in their possession prior to the bombing concerning individuals ultimately determined to have been involved.
This is a critical area ripe for refinement.