Bruce Hoffman is a professor at Georgetown University and Visiting Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has served as a commissioner on the Independent Commission to Review the FBI’s Post-9/11 Response to Terrorism and Radicalization, a Scholar-in-Residence for Counterterrorism at the CIA, and an adviser on counterterrorism to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2004.
The Cipher Brief: Can you give us a sense strategically, of how al-Baghdadi’s death could shake up the major terrorism networks? Is it realistic to think there might be potential collaboration between al-Qaeda and ISIS?
Hoffman: Obviously the killing of al-Baghdadi is a very positive development, so I don't want to minimize that, but of course, for nearly the past two decades, we've been capturing and killing terrorist leaders, and yet the struggle against terrorism continues. So, my only caution would be that in the past we've often ignored the repercussions of these types of targeted killings of leaders, and sometimes I think we’ve over-exaggerated the impact their elimination has on the terrorist organization they led, or were commanders in.
Certainly, in the case of ISIS, it's a grave setback. It's not clear who would be the most likely successor because al-Baghdadi himself claimed a familial lineage that dated back to the Prophet, so that positioned him in a rather unique way. But my concern is that to the rank and file ISIS fighter, this is a divinely ordained struggle and the mere death of a mortal, even a leader and founder of an organization, doesn't end a divinely commanded struggle. So, on one level or another, ISIS’s violence will continue. The question is how? I think it's obvious that Baghdadi's strategy, has not being a rousing success. The caliphate is gone. ISIS has lost all the territory it once had and now its founder and leader is dead. But the al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has all along argued that al-Qaeda's strategic patience and long game is the best way forward, and that Baghdadi's promiscuous approach to declaring the caliphate before the situation was appropriate ended in failure. Now it's also ended in his death.
I think it's likely that some members of ISIS, will now begin to seriously question the direction that Baghdadi took them in with his death. These circumstances are thus ripe for ISIS fighters to consider defecting and joining al-Qaeda, or for al-Qaeda itself—as it's done in the past —forcibly taking over a rival terrorist group, or even a voluntary re-amalgamation by ISIS with al-Qaeda. Their ideology is the same, I would say even their strategies are remarkably similar. Where they differed is tactically and certainly in the deep profound personal enmity between al-Baghdadi and al-Zawahiri. But al-Baghdadi's gone, so that personal rivalry has arguably now been rendered irrelevant.
In recent months, al-Qaeda has been effecting a reconciliation in Idlib and in Northwestern Syria between its former franchise, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, with Hurras al-Din, which is probably al-Qaeda's main stalking horse in Syria now, and where even the cooperation of people like Muhammad Julani who was the cause of the original estrangement between al-Baghdadi and al-Zawahiri over Jabhat al-Nusra which al-Julani founded at al-Zawahiri's guidance. In other words, al-Qaeda has already been mending bridges and attempting to unite what is a very disparate Jihadi movement in Syria. Extending that to ISIS at this moment with ISIS’s strategy in complete disarray, with its leader and founder dead with no clear heir apparent visible isn't outside the realm of possibility for al-Qaeda.
Given that al-Baghdadi, much to my surprise, was killed in Idlib, which is not where I expected he would be. That's an al-Qaeda stronghold. Almost since the time that ISIS was expelled from the al-Qaeda fold in January 2014 there were repeated efforts between the two estranged groups to achieve some modus vivendi, including re-unification. So, cooperation or even re-amalgamation isn't outside of the realm of possibility. In fact, in December 2014, there was an attempted coup in Raqqa designed to bring ISIS back under the al-Qaeda fold. So, the disputes between the leadership of both organizations may not necessarily extend down to the foot soldiers or the rank and file.
And if, for instance, the remaining ISIS fighters in Syria, to ensure their survival, decided to ally with or rejoin al-Qaeda, I think the danger is then that the ISIS branches would follow suit. Not least because many of those branches were al-Qaeda franchises to begin with, like Boko Haram. And then I think we'd be facing a very different type of challenge in the struggle against terrorism because what al-Qaeda has always coveted is ISIS's dexterity in radicalization and recruitment via social media and also ISIS’s extensive external operations network. An understanding or alliance between the two groups would be transformative in terms of the global Salafi Jihadi threat.
The Cipher Brief: Do you think we'll see anything publicly from Zawahiri or al-Qaeda or ISIS in the next couple of weeks?
Hoffman: I think a lot of it depends on the rapidity with which a successor to al-Baghdadi is named—or not—and if that's even possible, on whether that in and of itself triggers internecine disputes, or succession rivalries, within ISIS. Al-Zawahiri in the past, has always held out the prospects for reunification and has called for an end to divisions in the Salafi-Jihadi movement, so it'll be interesting too to see what sort of response al-Qaeda issues to al-Baghdadi’s death. I don't want to imply either that a re-amalgamation or reunification is at all linear or pre-destined, I just think it's a very plausible outcome right now because many of the remaining senior ISIS commanders are themselves former Baathists or former Saddam Hussein loyalists, so these people are the archetypal survivors and they're going to look to ensure the longevity of the struggle that they've been engaged in since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, without necessarily being adverse to some rapprochement with al-Qaeda.
The Cipher Brief: Do you have any particular reaction to how President Trump, during his news conference, described the death of Baghdadi and whether that could have any positive or negative ramifications?
Hoffman: I think it reflected the emotional wellspring of having struck a major blow against a terrorist movement by eliminating its leader and it certainly revealed, I think, that enthusiasm. I think we've been at great pains not to personalize this war and there's always a danger in linking a movement to a specific person. So, in that sense, ISIS has suffered a grievous setback. Whether it's going to be the crushing blow that the president repeatedly stated, I think remains to be seen.
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