Implications of Islamic State Leader’s Death on the Global Terrorism Landscape

On Sunday, the White House announced Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder and leader of the Islamic State, had been killed in a U.S.-led operation in Syria over the weekend. The death of al-Baghdadi will have significant implications for the infamous terrorist group, as both the Trump administration and many counterterrorism experts insist. Speaking on the PBS NewsHour last night, Hassan Hassan, a director at the Center for Global Policy, discussed how the death of al-Baghdadi is more significant than that of Osama bin Laden given that the former was still in command of an organization determined to revive its caliphate whereas the major achievement of the latter person’s organization – the 9/11 attacks – had occurred a decade before. But others have observed that any change to global terrorism as a result of the death will be in the short term. Mike Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, speaking on the same PBS NewsHour segment said, “The fact is that [the Islamic State] had already lost its physical caliphate, and it had become a global network of inspiration and loose coordination across many nations and into the West.” He continued, “And Baghdadi is — as important as he was, his death doesn’t take away that basic inspiration, and the same basic playbook of small-scale attacks still, I think, poses roughly the same risk as it did before this raid.” Additionally, there are reports that the Islamic State has already appointed a successor, as an article from Newsweek notes. According to an analysis report published by the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (NJOHSP), the successor, Abdullah Qardash, was already leading the Islamic State’s day-to-day operations.

In the short term, there is a risk that al-Baghdadi’s death will motivate retaliatory attacks by Islamic State followers, as the NJOHSP report observes. Because of such concerns, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has indicated it is “operating at a heightened state of vigilance” as it and other agencies assess the potential for retaliation. For U.S. entities, it has published an UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY Joint Intelligence Bulletin (JIB) that discusses this risk in greater detail. Read the JIB at a separate page at WaterISAC.