By Michael Georgy
DUBAI, Aug 25 (Reuters) – Islamic State has described the 26-year-old Syrian man taken into custody after a stabbing rampage in the western German city of Solingen as a “soldier” of the group.
Though largely crushed by a U.S.-led coalition several years ago, IS has managed some major attacks while seeking to rebuild.
They include an assault on a Russian concert hall in March that killed at least 143 people and two explosions in the Iranian city of Kerman in January that killed nearly 100 people.
The Sunni militant group also claimed responsibility for an assault by suicide attackers on a mosque in Oman in July that killed at least nine people, raising fears the group may be attempting a comeback in new territory.
In August, authorities said a 19-year-old Austrian suspected of masterminding a planned attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna had vowed allegiance to the leader of Islamic State.
Following are facts about the movement.
HISTORY
At the height of its power from 2014-2017, IS’s “caliphate” held sway over a wide area of Syria and Iraq, imposing death and torture on opponents of its radical brand of Islam. Its fighters repeatedly defeated both countries’ armies and carried out or inspired attacks in dozens of cities around the world.
Its then leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, killed in 2019 by U.S. special forces in northwestern Syria, rose from obscurity to lead the ultra-hardline group and declare himself “caliph” of all Muslims.
The caliphate collapsed in Iraq, where it once had a base only a 30-minute drive from Baghdad, and in Syria, after a sustained military campaign by a U.S.-led coalition.
The new leader, known by a pseudonym Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Quraishi, remains shrouded in secrecy, almost a year after he was named to the role.
NEW TACTICS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
IS has switched tactics since the collapse of its caliphate and a string of other setbacks in the Middle East.
Once based in the Syrian city of Raqqa and the Iraqi city of Mosul, from which it sought to rule like a centralised government, the group took refuge in the hinterlands of the two fractured countries.
Its fighters are scattered in autonomous cells, its leadership is clandestine and its overall size is hard to quantify. The U.N. estimates it at 10,000 in its heartlands.
The movement went underground with sleeper cells that launch hit-and-run attacks, according to an Iraqi government security adviser who helps track IS.
All key foreign fighters fled Iraq for countries such as Afghanistan, Syria and Pakistan. Most have joined Islamic State’s Khorasan branch (ISIS-K), named after an old term for the region that included parts of Iran, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.
It is active along Iran’s borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Sanaullah Ghafari, the 29-year-old leader of the Afghan branch of IS, has overseen its transformation into one of the most fearsome branches of the global Islamist network, capable of operations far from its bases in the borderlands of Afghanistan.
AFRICA
Islamic State – often called ISIS, ISIL, or the pejorative Daesh – has also made its mark in parts of Africa.
In Uganda, militants from IS-connected rebel Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), staged a series of attacks in recent months including a massacre at a boarding school, the murder of a honeymooning couple and, last month, a raid on a village that killed at least three people.
The group, which started as an uprising in Uganda, has largely moved its operations to neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo where it has staged multiple attacks.
Several other groups have pledged allegiance to IS in West Africa and across the Sahel. Affiliates have control of large areas of rural Mali, Niger and northern Burkina Faso and into North Africa.
In January 2023, the U.S. military carried out an operation that killed a senior IS leader in northern Somalia. The U.N. fears militant groups could exploit the political instability in Sudan, which is gripped by a civil war.
OVERALL STRENGTH
The U.S. National Counterterrorism Center has said the threat posed by IS and another militant group al Qaeda “is at a low point with the suppression of the most dangerous elements”.
But it went on to warn that half of IS’s branches are now active in insurgencies across Africa and “may be poised for further expansion”.
It said the group had lost three overall leaders and at least 13 other senior operatives in Iraq and Syria since early 2022 “contributing to a loss of expertise and a decline in ISIS attacks in the Middle East”.
(Reporting by Michael Georgy; Additional reporting by Catherine CartierEditing by Andrew Cawthorne and Kirsten Donovan)
