Despite spokesmans death, Deep Bench in IS

 - Deccan Herald

The reported death of Islamic State’s senior propagandist and strategist Abu Muhammad al-Adnani in a US drone strike in northern Syria on Tuesday casts in sharp relief the immediate challenge the terrorist group faces in replacing one of its pivotal founding members. 

The attack, carried out by a military Reaper drone, also underscores the progress the military’s most elite Special Operations commandos and the Central Intelligence Agency have made in the conflict’s two years by using information from spies on the ground and sensors in the sky to target a growing number of IS leaders. The US-led coalition has killed about 120 important IS officials and operators, including about a dozen of the group’s top leaders, according to the Pentagon. 

Still, the IS has proved to be remarkably resilient, US officials and counterterrorism specialists say, noting that the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has succession plans to replace even its top leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, should he be killed. 

"There’s a deep bench,” said William McCants of the Brookings Institution, the author of "The ISIS Apocalypse.” In the coming days, al-Baghdadi is likely to meet with his shura, or council of advisers, in Raqqa, the group’s self-proclaimed capital in Syria, to pick a replacement for al-Adnani, a 39-year-old Syrian, who had been believed to be al-Baghdadi’s heir apparent.

Replacement candidates

Among the leading candidates to replace al-Adnani is Turki al-Binali, 31, one of the most senior clerics of the terror group, who is believed to have been appointed the group’s chief mufti, said Cole Bunzel, a doctoral candidate at Princeton who has been researching al-Binali’s work. 

A native of Bahrain, al-Binali is considered a prodigy who studied under some of the top leaders in the jihadi pantheon, including Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who is regarded as one of the most influential al-Qaeda ideologues. 

"Even more important than that is that he is an extremely talented speaker, orator - kind of like Adnani,” said Bunzel, who wrote a Brookings Institution paper on the ideology of the IS. As early as 2013, al-Binali is believed to have travelled to join IS in Syria, where he began producing some of the group’s most influential theological treatises which laid the foundation for the group’s future actions. 

On April 30, 2014, he published an essay arguing that one does not need to have full territorial control before declaring an Islamic caliphate. The concept of territorial control was believed by many to be a prerequisite for a caliphate, said. 

Bunzel, and al-Binali’s essay served to clear the way for the declaration of the caliphate months later in the summer of 2014. Bunzel said he suspected that it was al-Binali who headed the Islamic State’s Research and Fatwa Department, which issued pamphlets explaining the legality of raping enslaved Yazidi women. 

US intelligence officials said al-Binali may have also travelled recently to Libya to help IS bolster its franchise there, an affiliate group that in recent weeks has been driven out of its stronghold in Sirte. 

Laith Alkhouri, a director at Flashpoint, a business risk intelligence company in New York that tracks militant and cyber threats, said while Binali is certainly a contender for a greater leadership role, he may have been marginalised in recent months. 

If so, Alkhouri said, another candidate could be Abu Luqman, also known as Ali Mousa Al-Shawwakh, who was the first wali, or ruler, in Raqqa and led much of the IS strategy in Aleppo in 2015. 

Alkhouri said Luqman fits the characteristics of someone IS would trust as spokesman. He was imprisoned by the Syrian government before the revolution, holds a law degree and worked as a recruiter for the forerunner of IS during the US occupation of Iraq. 

Luqman has been reported killed several times: once in an airstrike, another time by being stabbed by a Libyan fighter who was displeased by Luqman’s treatment of foreign fighters. His death has never been officially confirmed. The person who takes al-Adnani’s place will undoubtedly work closely with al-Baghdadi, the organisation’s shadowy leader. 

Al-Baghdadi meets periodically with regional emirs at his headquarters in Raqqa. To ensure his safety, special drivers pick up each of the emirs and take their cellphones and any other electronics to avoid inadvertently disclosing their location through tracking by US intelligence, US officials said. 

The high stakes at play in the apparent death of al-Adnani were revealed on Wednesday when the Russian military said that its warplanes had carried out a strike in Syria that killed up to 40 IS fighters, including al-Adnani. The Russian announcement appeared to be a direct challenge to the Pentagon, which claimed a day earlier that one of its drone strikes had killed the senior figure. 

Pentagon officials dismissed Russia’s claim, but have not confirmed the reports by IS’ official news agency that al-Adnani was killed. Russia has faced criticism from the West that its military intervention in Syria was undertaken to prop up President Bashar Assad of Syria, rather than to fulfil the Kremlin’s stated goal of fighting terrorism. This is the first public announcement from Russia that it had killed a specific senior figure in the terrorist group. 

Air campaign

For more than two years, al-Adnani had a $5 million bounty on his head, offered by the United States, and he was on the kill list for the US-led air campaign in Iraq and Syria. It is unclear how the United States identified and tracked al-Adnani, but his death, if confirmed, would highlight the ability of US agencies to collect and coordinate information gathered from raids on IS safe houses. 

Such raids produce intelligence from cellphones and computer hard drives and other information that is combined with an increasingly effective network of spies and informants to put pressure on IS leaders. That pressure may have been why al-Adnani was in the region of northern Syria where his vehicle was struck by Hellfire missiles on Tuesday night. 

Al Bab, where al-Adnani’s vehicle was hit, has become one of several hubs for IS operatives in recent years, in part because it is the largest population centre near the Turkish border that the group still controls, a place where IS figures can try to disappear among what’s left of an urban population. 

Al Bab has been devastated over the years, its civilian population caught between the brutal rule of the Islamic State and indiscriminate barrel bombings and airstrikes by the Syrian government. 

It is the biggest IS stronghold in Aleppo province, a territory that is increasingly embattled. The area that IS holds along the Turkish border, separating two Kurdish enclaves, is under pressure from several directions. 

A new Turkish incursion, with artillery, tanks and air power backing a ground force of US- and Turkish-backed Syrian rebels, has increased the fighting as it seizes new territory from IS and as the new force clashes with Kurdish-led militias also fighting IS. 

The IS established itself early on in northern Aleppo province, but was driven out of many towns and villages in early 2014 by rival insurgent groups, including US-backed rebels. The group was pushed to the east, leaving IS in control only of a strip of northeastern Aleppo province anchored by Al Bab. 

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