EU: ISIS has failed and become impotent

Amira Sherif

European Union Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove has confirmed that ISIS has failed and has been unable to carry out complex operations such as those committed by its elements in Paris and Brussels five years ago, explaining that the terrorist organization is damaged but not extinct and is trying to move its scattered branches.

According to Al Arabiya, de Kerchove said, “I am not saying that the organization has ceased to exist, because it will try to emerge from its ashes as it tries to rely on its dispersed bases, as its branches are located in Africa.”

According to the estimates of European intelligence services, ISIS has become incapable of organizing complex terrorist operations such as those it committed at the Bataclan Theater in Paris or in Brussels.

Five years ago, ISIS was strong and numbered 35,000 foreign fighters, including 5,000 European fighters, which is a staggering number.

The terrorist organization had controlled a territory equal to the size of the United Kingdom, as well as enormous financial resources, but the international coalition was able to destroy ISIS and its alleged caliphate, Kerchove noted.

He explained that the backgrounds of the perpetrators of the recent terrorist operations in Paris and Vienna differ from the personality of the fighters who carried out the attacks in Brussels and Paris five years ago.

“The perpetrators of the recent operations in Paris and Vienna are not affiliated with ISIS and are considered local terrorists – that is, those who have not been trained in conflict areas,” Kerchove said, explaining that the recent terrorist operations are the work of local elements who are not involved with ISIS, although the organization is taking advantage of these attacks to announce its presence.

Kerchove said that these local terrorist elements are affected by speeches on the internet or discussions among militants in prisons, adding that when they commit an act of terrorism, they use simple tools such as a kitchen knife. “We have seen the Vienna bomber use a Kalashnikov, which is disturbing. However, terrorist tools remain less sophisticated than the operation that targeted the Bataclan Theater in France in 2015,” he added.

On November 13, 2015, Paris was rocked by a series of near-simultaneous shooting and bomb attacks on entertainment sites in the city, in which 130 people were killed and 368 injured. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks. Two of the ten attackers were citizens of Belgium, while three of them were French.

Then, on March 22, 2016, suicide bombers affiliated with ISIS, all from Belgium, detonated themselves at the Brussels airport and a subway in the Belgian capital, killing 32 people. Police said that there are links between that attack and the attacks that took place in Paris the previous November.

On October 16, 2020, an 18-year-old assailant of Chechen origins cut off the head of Samuel Paty, a teacher at a French school in a suburb of Paris, with a knife. The police shot dead the attacker. At the end of the same month, a Tunisian man beheaded a woman and killed two people with a knife at a church in Nice, before the police shot and arrested him.