AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The White House says President Biden will travel to New Orleans tomorrow and meet with those affected by that terror attack there. The suspect who drove a pickup truck into a crowd of people had posted videos online expressing support for ISIS. While there's no evidence officially linking him to the terrorist organization, the deadly incident is nonetheless raising questions about ISIS' global influence and the possible resurgence. Mara Revkin is a professor at Duke Law School who specializes in conflict in the Middle East, and she joins us now. Welcome to the program.
MARA REVKIN: Thanks for having me.
RASCOE: Let's start with the big question right now. Like, how concerned should people be about ISIS?
REVKIN: So I think it's important to keep in perspective that attacks like the one in New Orleans are so-called lone-wolf attacks that are inspired but not necessarily directed or orchestrated at all by the Islamic State. And the group has been encouraging and calling for these types of attacks by self-radicalized supporters for years, really from a position of weakness after having lost what it called its territorial caliphate that once spanned an area of Iraq and Syria around the size of Great Britain between 2014 and 2017. So although obviously devastating for those who've been killed and injured by these attacks, this is a real departure from what the Islamic State had been capable of when it governed substantial territory.
RASCOE: Talk to me about that because nearly six years ago, U.S.-led forces largely wiped out the ISIS caliphate. How has the group and its leadership changed since then?
REVKIN: The loss of territory in Iraq and Syria was a major setback for the group and quite devastating for its credibility. It really had to adapt and explain to its remaining supporters how it would continue to be relevant, having sort of failed to maintain the state that was so central to its identity. And it did that by arguing that the caliphate could be a so-called virtual caliphate that exists in the minds and hearts of its supporters temporarily. This occurred also in the context of the significant strengthening of some of the Islamic State's major rivals. So the Taliban, which now controls Afghanistan, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham - HTS - which now controls Syria, rival groups that are really sort of, from the Islamic State's perspective, outshining its capabilities.
RASCOE: Does the recent fall of the Assad regime in Syria create an opportunity for ISIS to revive its caliphate?
REVKIN: Yes, there is still a risk and a lot of concern about the potential for resurgence. We also know that there are around 10,000 alleged Islamic State fighters who were detained on the battlefield in 2018 and 2019 by Kurdish forces who are in detention in at least 12 different prison facilities in northeast Syria. That's a part of Syria that has been operating really sort of separately from what had been the Assad regime in control of Damascus and now is in a position of perhaps even greater vulnerability. So that's all just to say that the Kurds are really in a position of vulnerability and they've been bearing this enormous responsibility of managing and securing a population of more than 10,000 IS fighters in prisons that, in many cases, are pretty makeshift, very susceptible to jailbreaks, with very limited international support.
RASCOE: Well, how has the U.S. strategy for ISIS evolved over the years?
REVKIN: So the Biden administration's position for the last couple of years really has been that the war on terror was winding down and is now officially over. The official national security strategy has really shifted focus to domestic terrorism threats - sort of homegrown white nationalist, supremacist extremist organizations and then globally also a shift away from Iraq and Syria and towards some of these other nodes in Africa, Afghanistan and Asia where the Islamic State has managed to try to sort of maintain some presence on the ground.
RASCOE: What will you be keeping an eye on after President-elect Trump returns to the White House?
REVKIN: So the Islamic State, in its recent propaganda, has described Trump as an extension of previous U.S. policies of the global war on terrorism, a promoter of a war on Islam. And I think the Islamic State is going to be ready and looking for policies like travel bans targeting Muslims or people from Muslim-majority countries to fuel grievances in the United States and Europe.
The Islamic State has long had a theory of what it calls the gray zone, places in the United States and Europe or western countries that are not Muslim majority where nonetheless Muslims and non-Muslims have been able to coexist peacefully under democracies. The Islamic State views that coexistence as a threat to its vision.
The Islamic State, therefore, has had a deliberate strategy of trying to undermine this so-called gray zone. This has included inciting terrorist attacks that provoke Western governments into adopting xenophobic or Islamophobic policies that then drive grievances among Muslim communities, with the goal of basically making Muslims feel unsafe in the United States and Europe such that they will be more receptive to the Islamic State's potentials of recruitment and outreach.
RASCOE: That's Mara Revkin, a professor of law at Duke University. Thank you so much for joining us.
REVKIN: Thank you so much.
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