ISIS attacks surge in Africa even as Trump boasts of a ‘100-percent’ defeated

Days later, a different band of Islamist gunmen rampaged through a famous wildlife park for giraffes in Koure, Niger, just 35 miles from the country’s capital. Firing from motorbikes, they killed eight people, including six French humanitarian workers.

The two attacks on opposite sides of Africa are among the scores of violent episodes to shake the continent in what experts are calling a breakout year for extremist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. Less than two years after the fall of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq, the terrorist group is attempting a comeback in Africa, with far-reaching implications for a region already beset by poverty, corruption and the novel coronavirus.

At least three Islamist insurgencies are surging across broad swaths of territory, from the deserts of the Sinai, to the scrublands of the western Lake Chad basin, to picturesque Indian Ocean villages and resort islands in the Southeast. The spike in terrorist attacks mirrors a steady, if less dramatic, increase in Islamist violence in parts of Syria and Iraq, driven by Islamic State fighters who slipped away after the caliphate’s defeat and have now regrouped.

The resurgence threatens to undermine one facet of President Trump’s reelection pitch to voters: his oft-repeated claim of victory over the Islamic State. While Trump presided over the final phases of the U.S.-led military campaign to destroy the physical caliphate, the effort to contain the group and its violent ideology has faltered, according to current and former counterterrorism officials and independent analysts.

The rise in violence comes as the Trump administration moves to slash U.S. troop deployments and threatens to curtail support for local governments on the front lines of the battle against Islamist militants. The White House is considering steeper cutbacks in U.S. military forces in Africa, despite warnings from some analysts that the reductions could further hamper efforts to check the extremists’ advance.

“ISIS is not dead,” said Robert Richer, the CIA’s deputy director of operations during the George W. Bush administration, using a common acronym for the Islamic State. “We destroyed the caliphate, but they’re now popping up in numerous places. Meanwhile, the worldwide coalition to fight ISIS doesn’t really exist anymore.”

Trump has championed his counterterrorism successes at nearly every campaign event, often referring to the Islamic State in the past tense. “We obliterated 100 percent of the ISIS caliphate,” he said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in August.

But other officials say the threat has merely shifted to new regions and different forms. In the 18 months since the fall of the Islamic State’s last Syrian stronghold, the group’s African affiliates have seen dramatic gains in territory and recruits, as well as in firepower, according to a study published in August in CTC Sentinel, a journal published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

“Instead of an asymmetric, opportunistic insurgency, it’s large numbers of fighters, attacking large numbers of soldiers using weapons that are of a similar or greater caliber,” said Charlie Winter, a senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, and a co-author of the study. “And they have shown a decent ability to maneuver.”

As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump promised a speedy and resounding defeat of the Islamic State. In rallies and interviews, he vowed to “carpet-bomb” parts of Iraq and Syria held by the militants.

After his election, however, his White House advisers adopted, with minor adjustments, the strategy that had been in place by the Obama administration in 2014. Backed by a coalition of more than 80 countries, the United States provided air power and intelligence support for Iraqi troops and Kurdish and Syrian Arab fighters who liberated terrorist-held towns one by one. About half of the caliphate’s land holdings — including parts of Mosul, the Islamic State’s eastern capital — had been freed by the time Trump took office in 2017.

Trump’s prosecution of the war drew praise from many counterterrorism experts, as did the administration’s effort to find and kill the Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who blew himself up when cornered by U.S. Special Operations forces in October 2019. The aggressive hunt for the leader also marked a continuation of tactics in place since the latter years of the Bush administration.

“The biggest success story for us in the last dozen years is the way we created a leadership crisis in the global jihadist movement, by effectively…