ISIL may not be the all-conquering military force it once was, but it has shown remarkable resilience and a great ability to regroup its forces and reorganise after defeat, as it has done in Palmyra. The historic city in Syria’s Homs governorate was seized by ISIL forces last year. In March, Syrian government forces backed by Russian air support liberated the city in what was considered to be a major symbolic victory for president Bashar Al Assad. But on Sunday, ISIL fighters made a lightning-fast advance across the town, taking advantage of the vacuum left by Syrian forces pushing forward in Aleppo.
Their actions in the past few days have confirmed that members of the extremist group have been able to cross borders at will before regrouping and returning to the fray. There will be a concern after Mosul falls, that ISIL members may vanish into the general population.
This tactic is nothing new. Some of the several hundred ISIL fighters who took part in the battle for Sirte, Libya, this year survived not just that defeat but also previous battles in Mosul, Manbej, Jarabulus and elsewhere near the Syrian-Turkish border.
Sirte may not be controlled by ISIL any more, but the threat is far from over as many of these fighters are thought to have slipped out of the town or to have dissipated into the crowd. The same thing has been happening in Iraq.
According to some estimates, tens of thousands of ISIL combatants have neither been killed nor captured, they have simply disappeared. They have either integrated into local communities or escaped into other countries in the Middle East, North Africa and even Europe, where the fear is that they could launch terrorist attacks.
Over the past year, intelligence sharing among Arab and western countries has improved dramatically, increasing the possibility of foiling these attacks. We must remain vigilant, and all efforts must be made to find these people and prosecute them.
