When he was interviewed by journalist Laurent Delahousse on December 17th, 2017, Emmanuel Macron wasn't getting too far ahead of himself with his prediction that “between now and the middle or end of February we'll have won the war in Syria”. For the war against Islamic State that the French president was talking about is extending its borders. Over and above the military reverses and loss of territory that IS suffered to its self-styled Caliphate in 2017, President Macron is very well aware of the reports from France's secret services that for a month or more have warned about the organisation's “imminent” plans to move underground.
Over the last three months Mediapart has carried out a series of interviews with people inside the secret services to piece together the details of the reports and predictions which have gone to the French government. They outline the likely shape that the French services and their allies think Islamic State will assume in the course of 2018.
The terrorist organisation did not wait for the French president's forecast before acting in the face of the loss of its caliphate and previous strongholds in Syria and Iraq. The group's own secret service the Amniyat (see Mediapart's articles on this here and here) had drawn its own conclusions from the targeted executions of its members by Western military strikes and, according to one well-placed antiterrorist source, “moved everything” into the Euphrates Valley.
As Mediapart has already revealed, the Israeli intelligence service Mossad had warned French counterparts that at the start of 2017 - well before the fall of its strongholds Mosul and Raqqa - Islamic State moved several members of Amniyat “involved in the planning of external operations” to the town of Mayadin, which at the time was away from the main fighting.
Then, as its last bastions in the Euphrates Valley were on the point of falling, Islamic State reorganised itself and “carried out internal reforms aimed at preparing its return into secrecy and to guarantee its survival”, according to security sources. Several leading figures were reportedly replaced.
This change of personnel was partly forced upon the organisation by its losses – the international coalition claimed it killed around 20 IS leaders during 2017 – but also because of “internal dissension between ultra radicals and the leadership”, says an intelligence source. The dispute was over whether Muslims who did not support Islamic State should be targeted or not. The self-proclaimed Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself favoured an “anti-Shi'ite line” and justified the “punishment of apostates and infidels”. A sign of this hardening approach came when, according to Mediapart's information, 175 Iraqis, Uzbeks and Tunisians were executed in Raqqa and at a nearby military camp in the autumn of of 2016, on the pretext of refusing to go to the front.
A year and a half later the question is not whether to fight or not but about being prepared to vanish into the anonymity of the desert to launch a new insurrection. This is something Islamic State propaganda has been preparing itself for over the past few months. Indeed, according to Mediapart's information some Islamic State cells have already infiltrated Baghgad and are lying dormant, ready to carry out the kind of “complex” strikes against multiple targets seen in Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016. The French secret services doubt, however, whether the jihadists are currently capable of doing the same in Damascus.
The big question now, as the Caliphate collapses and the terrorist organisation reorganises itself, is what will happen to its foreign jihadists. According to estimates from various Western intelligence agencies more than 2,100 European jihadists are still in the Syria-Iraq zone, while more than 1,000 are said to have been killed since the start of the conflict, including 286 French citizens. But here the agencies all come up against the same difficulty: obtaining proof of death of those said to have been killed. This has become even harder since Islamic State stopped giving information on its fighters who had fallen in battle.
According to the interviews Mediapart has carried out, some intelligence experts think that the number of deaths has been under-estimated and that the contingent of French jihadists in the area has been “decimated”. Others, though, think the opposite. For instance, out of seven French citizens initially recorded as being killed during battles in September and October 2017, only one of them turned out in fact to be dead. To help its macabre roll-call of death, one French intelligence agency has apparently handed out DNA kits to Kurdish fighters to help identify French citizens, among the dead as well as the living.
For those European jihadists who have survived and are not already taken prisoner, Western intelligence agencies foresee three main scenarios: that they stay in the region, that they “relocate” to a different country or that they return to Europe.
Intelligence officials consider that the “most likely” scenario for the French continent of jihadists is that they will stay in the region. According to the secret services a majority of the 684 individuals of French nationality or who had been resident in France - and in particular “seasoned fighters” - are likely to stay loyal to Islamic State and swell the ranks of its “operational reserve” ready to carry out more guerrilla operations and suicide attacks in the future.
Among these fighters some will stay through conviction, others will stay because they fear the criminal prosecutions they will face if they return to France. But whatever their motives, the financial situation for these jihadists is getting tougher. A “growing” number of them are said to be asking friends and relatives to send them funds. As its own resources have dwindled, Islamic State has given less to its fighters.
French fighters have found it hard to integrate with local populations
At first friends or relatives who were asked to help were simply topping up the fighter's finances in Iraq or Syria. Now those funds have become the jihadists' main source of income. These payments are made through money transfer systems, in particular those operated by Western Union, and are received by the Islamic State's collectors and then passed on to the fighters. According to the French state's Tracfin department, which monitors potential money-laundering and suspect transfers of money, some 650,000 dollars have been sent in this way by people in France since the start of the Caliphate on June 29th, 2014, most of it through small transfers.
This financial help is simply delaying the inevitable for most of these fighters. For those who abide by their sworn allegiance to Islamic State “death or capture are the most likely outcomes of this commitment”, says a source at France's internal intelligence service the DGSI.
For those fighters who neither want to return to France nor endure the Islamic State's policy of fighting to the bitter end, then the group Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham ('Liberation of the Levant Organisation ') – a coalition of groups led by Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, former head of the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda from whom he split in July 2016 – offers an alternative. The intelligence services already saw some survivors defecting from Islamic State in 2017 and joining the French-speaking armed group Firqatul Ghuraba, which operates in the north-west of Syria, the area where Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham is based. The services believes that this switch by some IS fighters to other insurgency groups could increase in volume in 2018.
The armed brigade Firqatul Ghuraba, which is under the control of the Senegalese-born Omar Diaby who recruited jihadists in the French city of Nice, has already taken in around 15 Franco-Belgian volunteers who managed to get into Syria in 2017. “It is ideologically close to Al Qaeda, and from this point of view it is compatible with the French volunteers, even if it has a strictly Syrian agenda,” says one DGSI source. “Away from the fighting, Omar Diaby's group could recruit such renegades in particular.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The main reason that Western intelligence agencies are keeping a close eye on the movements of the jihadists still in the region is because of the two other potential scenarios for 2018: that of these fighters “relocating” to another country or returning to Europe. The secret services say that for the time being there has not been any “massive return movement” but that the decision by IS to go underground is “by its nature going to make it harder to spot trends”. The French services are thus stepping up cooperation with their foreign counterparts to share information and “reduce these uncertainties”.
In 2018 nowhere appears to offer jihadists what one source calls the “characteristics of a territorial sanctuary” that would allow a mass exodus to one area. On the face of it the Pakistani-Afghan border area, a zone known for radical Islamic groups and where the Islamic State-inspired 'Wilayat Khorasan' or Khorasan Province which straddles the two borders was established in 2015, seems an ideal area for them. Some networks reaching there already exist, crossing through Turkey and Iran. These routes have been indeed used by some jihadist Uzbeks returning home from Syria but it remains accessible for a limited number of jihadists only. This is, say intelligence sources, because of the “difficulties” in being accepted by and adapting to the complex network of radical Afghan groups on the ground.
In 2017 a number of Yemeni, Saudi and Moroccan fighters were killed during fighting between pro-Islamic State groups and the army in the south of the Philippines. But there has been no sign of any French fighters going there. Indeed, the intelligence agencies think it is unlikely that the French contingent will relocate to another country, whether it be Yemen or South-East Asia. Even after four years the French fighters found it hard to integrate with the local populations in Syria and Iraq.
In contrast, dual national French fighters with North African origins do not find it hard to acclimatise to those African countries. The intelligence services have observed Islamic State sympathisers being active in Libya, an ideal location for veterans originally from that region. Several hundred Libyans and Tunisians have already come from Syria and Iraq to join IS groups in Libya since 2015. But the Caliphate's main two Libyan bastions, Sabratha and Sirte, were lost by the jihadists in 2016. So for the time being the conditions on the ground do not favour a mass exodus of French fighters to that country.
In a more general sense the intelligence agencies consider that any exodus of French fighters will mainly be restricted by “operational constraints”, the chief one being crossing Turkey. The Cazeneuve Protocol between France and Turkey – named after the then French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve – allows for radical French Islamists arrested in Turkey to be expelled to France. This stops them from being able to take advantage of Turkish administrative arrangements that allow Islamic State sympathisers to leave the region, for example to go to Malaysia or Sudan - countries for whom no visa is required. French fighters wanting to 'relocate' in this way would have to do so in secrecy.
So French fighters unwilling to take that risk will instead have to have the correct credentials to get back into France. The security agencies believe that this will lead to a growing number of people “surrendering” or at least nurturing the “hope” that they can return to France this year. In 2017 the number of returnees was very small, with just ten or so cases recorded. But that should change now that Islamic State has lost its last refuges in the Euphrates Valley.
Meanwhile the widows of some fighters who have been “left to their own devices and deprived of other alternatives” are already seeking to return to France with their children. So far this has not been in huge numbers and those involved are being tracked.
On the face of it, then, the signs are encouraging from the point of view of the security services.
The jihadists' secret travel agency
There is, however, another factor to take into account, which is the ability of some Islamic State leaders to remain one step ahead. Several sources have confirmed to Mediapart that the intelligence services are now up against a mysterious structure called the “Emigration and Logistics Committee”, a cell run by members of IS's Amniyat, which has been based in Turkey since early 2017 but which also has a presence in Jordan and Lebanon.
This secret organisation is in charge of logistics, including sourcing travel documents and funding journeys, finding people places to stay and of ensuring the security of jihadist leaders who are fleeing to safer countries. The intelligence agencies fear that this Emigration and Logistics Committee is also being used to send European jihadists back to their countries of origin “to plan or support terrorist plans on behalf of IS there”.
Contrary to the general mood of euphoria about the fall of the Caliphate and the resulting removal of the threat on French territory, the intelligence agencies continue to think that despite its “military reverses” the Islamic State has retained its capacity to cause harm, and that it even remains the “main terrorist threat” on the European continent.
The reason for this thinking is that the attacks in Europe multiplied in number even as Islamic State lost territory in Iraq and Syria. The countries targeted since 2016 have broadened: Germany with six attacks, Britain with five and Belgium, also with five, have suffered repeated attacks while Sweden and Finland have been hit by the first attacks of this type on their soil. There was also a double attack in Barcelona and nearby Cambrils on August 17th, 2017, which killed 16 people.
It is true that the majority of these have been basic attacks, known in the jargon as “low intensity”; in other words, mostly with knives. These are opportunistic attacks carried out by local sympathisers who were never able to join the Caliphate, and who have used the means at their disposal to carry out attacks in their own country.
It is also true that in recent months the amount of propaganda used to encourage supporters in the West to carry out such acts has reduced, and that jihadists who have remained in Syria have found it harder and harder to communicate with aspiring terrorists in Europe.
Yet another factor are the drone strikes that have killed several key figures in Islamic State's external operations in recent months.
Overall the picture seems to suggest that the threat is changing. Attacks planned by IS from its Iraqi and Syrian strongholds and put into action by battle-hardened jihadists – for example at Verviers in Belgium and in Paris in 2015 and in Brussels in early 2016 – have been succeeded by attacks that have simply been inspired by Islamic State and carried out by local individuals or, more rarely, terrorist cells.
But a series of recent articles shows that Islamic State still wants to use more sophisticated and deadly methods to strike the West and avenge its defeats in the Middle East. The Belgian journalist Guy Van Vlierden, from the Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws, revealed on his blog on January 30th, 2018, details from an interrogation of a jihadist who is originally from Antwerp and who was arrested by Kurdish forces near Raqqa in Syria. In his interrogation the jihadist talks of “three European women” trained to carry out a suicide attack and who are going to be sent to Europe.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
Just a day later The Guardian said that in late November Interpol had circulated a list of 50 suspected trained Islamic State fighters who it thinks landed in Italy by boat, and “may be attempting to reach other European countries”. It reported fears that one of the fighters had already made it to the Gard département or county in southern France.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, has reported on a worrying message posted on the social messaging platform Telegram on December 30th, 2017. On an undated photograph (see above) a hooded man with his face concealed behind a scarf bearing the Islamic State 'logo' is pictured in the snow at Central park in New York, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the background. The simple message reads: “We are in your home.”
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The French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter