How Islamic State Gains From Strife Among Its Enemies

If there is one cause common to the governments of the U.S., Turkey, Iraq and Iran, it’s the continued suppression of Islamic State, the most destructive Islamist militant organization the world has seen. Working together and separately, those nations and their allies by early 2019 managed to subdue the group in Iraq and Syria, where it once controlled a chunk of territory as big as Iceland. Now, tensions among the countries that dismantled Islamic State threaten to subvert efforts to combat its resurgence.

Its self-declared caliphate -- a state that claims dominion over all Muslims -- has been in ruins since March 2019 when U.S.-assisted Syrian Kurdish forces, Russian-backed Syrian government troops and Iranian-supported fighters from Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Pakistan took the group’s last remaining strongholds in Syria. It had lost its territorial foothold in neighboring Iraq in 2017 to government forces backed by a U.S.-led multinational coalition. The group’s enigmatic leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed in a U.S. strike in northern Syria in October. His death is widely believed to have been a blow to the group, but not a fatal one. U.S. intelligence concluded that it would have little impact on the group’s ability to rebuild.