Full-fledged ISIS insurgency still in doubt, says top U.S. commander

Iraqi counterterrorism officials and their American counterparts are still evaluating the threat posed by the remnants of Islamic State in Iraq, refusing to characterize the jihadi group’s various cells scattered across the country as a full-fledged insurgency.

While sleeper cells linked to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, have been able to execute a series of deadly suicide bombings and attacks against Iraqi security forces and civilians alike, top commanders within the U.S.-led military coalition in the country maintain the attacks show little indication of coordinated operations by a networked insurgency.

“I would say that it would be too early to make that kind of an assessment” on whether the Islamic State has devolved into an insurgency movement inside Iraq, Marine Corps Brig. Gen. James Glynn said.

Islamic State factions who remain inside Iraq represent more of “a cellular structure who seek to bring instability to local areas, in particular population centers,” said Gen. Glynn, who is the coalition’s deputy commander for the U.S. special operations task force based in Iraq.

But efforts by Iraqi military and intelligence forces, with American backing, have prevented those Islamic State sleeper cells “to form into a network or something that could look like an insurgency,” he told reporters at the Pentagon during a briefing from coalition headquarters in Baghdad.

Iraqi commanders have long warned of Islamic State fighters going underground and forming an insurgency after local and coalition forces ousted the jihadi group from its self-styled Iraqi capital of Mosul. Iraqi and coalition forces liberated the country’s second-largest city from Islamic State control late last year.

Even before the liberation of Mosul, concern among American commanders had been growing over an Islamic State-led insurgency in Iraq.

“What are we seeing the enemy doing — and we are already seeing them do it — is going to go to an insurgency, which is what we have been seeing for the last 10 years,” Army Maj. Gen. Gary Volesky, top commander running the American ground war against Islamic State in 2016, told The Washington Times during an interview in Baghdad.

“We are already looking at areas where [the mission] is already transitioning to counterinsurgency,” he said at the time. “ISIS doesn’t disappear after Mosul is liberated. … You can’t lift your finger off this threat.”

Monday’s claim of responsibility for a pair of deadly suicide bombings in central Baghdad indicate Islamic State in Iraq is well on its way to morphing into a viable insurgency — similar to the one that bloodied American and allied forces during the darkest days of the Iraq War.

The pair of bombings, which left 26 dead and over 90 injured in the city’s bustling al-Tayaran Square, were the beginning of a so-called “vengeance” campaign by the jihadi group against Iraq’s central government, the terror group proclaimed in its claim of responsibility for the attacks. Islamic State fighters vowed to launch more suicide attacks inside the Iraqi capital and elsewhere in Iraq and the West, akin to the slew of deadly bombings that rocked Baghdad during the holy month of Ramadan last year.

Gen. Glynn declined to comment on the Islamic State’s claims that Monday’s attacks were the kickoff for a vengeance campaign inside Iraq. But the one-star general did say the attacks were the work of a badly-defeated terror group on the verge of total defeat.

“There are remnants of ISIS who have been isolated and face some pretty dire choices. And they are to try to come together with potentially with other elements,” to delegitimize Baghdad’s battlefield victories, he said. “What the government of Iraq and their very capable security forces are focused on is ensuring that that doesn’t happen.”