Two Iraqi security sources and three independent analysts believe the next Islamic State leader will come from a small group of battle-hardened Iraqi jihadists who appeared in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion.

According to Iraqi officials, one of the prospective successors to Abu Ibrahim al-Quraishi, who blew himself up in Syria last week during a US mission to capture him, includes a commander who Washington and Baghdad declared dead last year.

Quraishi’s death, two years after IS’s longstanding leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a similar raid in 2019, was another crushing blow to the militant Sunni Muslim group.

In response to increasing pressure from Iraqi and US-led forces, Quraishi, an Iraqi, never publicly addressed his fighters or fans, eschewed electronic contacts, and oversaw a shift to combat in local decentralized units.

Those who follow Islamic State carefully expect it to identify a successor in the coming weeks, as the group that ruled wide swaths of Iraq and Syria with brutality from 2014 to 2017 continues to wage a tenacious and deadly insurgency.

One of Iraq’s security experts, Fadhil Abu Rgheef, said that there were at least four people who could take over.

“These include … Abu Khadija, whose last known role was Iraq leader for Islamic State, Abu Muslim, its leader for Anbar province, and another called Abu Salih, of whom there’s very little information but who was close to Baghdadi and Quraishi,” he said.

“There’s also Abu Yassir al-Issawi, who is suspected to be still alive. He’s valuable to the group as he has long military experience.”

Both Iraqi forces and the US-led military coalition fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria claimed Issawi’s killing in an air strike in January 2021.

But, according to an Iraqi security official, there are significant suspicions that Issawi is still alive. “If he’s not dead he’d be a candidate, he’s tried and tested in planning military attacks and has thousands of supporters,” the official said.

Before convening to nominate or announce a successor, the official claimed, Islamic State was likely conducting a security sweep for potential leaks that led to Quraishi’s execution.

The new leader, according to Hassan Hassan, editor of New Lines magazine, which has published material on Quraishi, will be an experienced Iraqi jihadist.

“If they choose one in the coming weeks they’ll have to choose someone from among the same circle … the group that was part of the Anbari group which operated under (the name) ISIS since the early days,” he said.

After 2003, the militants who conducted an increasingly Sunni Islamist, sectarian-driven insurgency against US troops and Iraqi forces became known as Islamic State.

The Islamic State of Iraq or ISIS, also known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, was an offshoot of the global al-Qaeda group of Osama Bin Laden and the precursor to ISIS, which took shape in the chaos of Syria’s civil war across the border.

In the mid-2000s, Baghdadi and Quraishi, both founding members of al-Qaeda in Iraq, spent time in US custody. According to one security official and one army colonel who spoke to Reuters, none of the four prospective successors to Quraishi had been taken by US forces.

Officials and analysts from a number of countries concur that Islamic State is facing greater strain than it has ever faced and its self-proclaimed caliphate will never be restored. They disagree, though, about how much of a setback Quraishi’s death means for the group.

Some believe that the war against ISIS will engulf the US and its allies for years to come as it evolves into a permanent insurgency with new leaders poised to seize over.

“In Syria, Islamic State units work as a devolved network of individual groups in order to avoid them being targeted. We don’t therefore believe that Quraishi’s death will have an enormous impact,” one of the Iraqi security officials said.

“It’s also become more difficult to follow them because they’ve long stopped using mobile phones for communication.” According to some officials, Islamic State leaders have found it increasingly easier to move between Iraq and Syria since their territorial defeats in 2017 and 2019. This has been aided by a gap in regions of control between separate armed groups.

According to security and military sources, Iraq’s 600-kilometer (372-mile) border with Syria makes it extremely difficult for Iraqi forces to prevent militants from invading via underground tunnels.

Some IS officials, according to Lahur Talabany, a former counter-terrorism chief for Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, can travel across the entirety of Iraq.

“When you see attacks increasing in a particular area I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody important has been through that region,” he told Reuters. “The caliphate was defeated but ISIS was never eradicated. I don’t believe we managed to finish the job.”

When Islamic State established a caliphate in 2014, claiming authority over all Muslim countries and peoples, it separated itself apart from other like-minded groups like al-Qaeda, and it became crucial to its mission.

The group, which is vehemently anti-Western, also exploits Sunni-Shi’ite tensions, claiming that Shi’ites are infidels who ought to be slaughtered.

According to Abu Rgheef, the new leader’s military credentials could be greater than Quraishi’s, who Iraqi officials believe was viewed by supporters as more of an Islamic legal scholar than a military man.

“Attacks and operations will change in character depending on the style of the new leader. The new one might believe in big and intensive attacks, bombs or suicide bombers,” he said.

Despite Quraishi’s low profile and operational secrecy, experts believe his death will have an impact on the group’s fighters.

Hassan said Quraishi’s removal would reduce morale. “ISIS is also locked into personalities and who’s most trusted,” he said.

Aaron Zelin, senior fellow at the Washington Institute, said a figurehead is very important to ISIS.

“Whenever a leader of the group is killed, your oath is to the (next) leader, the individual themselves, and not to the group.”

Image Credit: AFP

You were reading: Who will be the next leader of ISIS after Quraishi? Experts reveal