Resilient Resurgence: How the Islamic State Survived Through Its Affiliates in Afghanistan and West Africa

Abstract

In 2019, the United States declared total victory over the Islamic State, a claim that promoted a false sense of security globally. While the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was defeated territorially in 2017, its affiliates throughout the Middle East and Africa remained alive and well. Long after ISIS’s fall, two affiliates carried out its ruthless legacy of violence and terror: the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) and the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISK). This thesis analyzes how ISK and ISWAP remained resilient in the face of ISIS's fall, mounting resistance, heavy losses, and focused efforts to defeat them. It examines seven factors that affected the affiliates’ success, including their formation methods, competition with other extremist groups, the role of central governments in the territories they operated, the lack of a foreign counterterrorism presence, recruiting methods and ideology, financing, and flexible targeting. It argues that the most important factors were the presence of conflict, weak central governments, resilient financing structures, and an ideology that allowed ISK and ISWAP to outbid opponents for recruits. It also finds that ISK and ISWAP do not maintain a constant strategy, adapting their tactics over time to respond to their operational environments. These groups are resilient, and every day they are ignored, their capacity to strike the U.S., Europe, and Asia only grows.