Despite its defeat by an international coalition in 2019, Daesh is starting to expand again and is worrying the intelligence services, ten years after its formation.
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What remains of Daesh? In 2014, from a minaret in Mosul, the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, declared the establishment of a caliphate in a territory spanning Syria and Iraq, a state governed by Islamic sharia law. An announcement that had galvanized and united thousands of jihadist vocations across the planet. The group is, for example, behind the attacks of November 13, 2015, in Paris.
After five years of a war led by an international coalition of fourteen countries, the Islamic State group was declared defeated in 2019. But, however, it has not disappeared. In March 2024, 137 people were shot by jihadists in a Moscow concert hall.
A sinister echo of the Paris attacks which abruptly reminded us that the Islamic State group was far from having disappeared. Since the loss of its last geographic stronghold, in Syria, in 2019, after five years of war led by the international coalition, the organization has certainly weakened. Its financing resources have been noticeably dried up. But the terrorist group, rival of Al-Qaeda, has gradually redeployed.
Still present in Syria and Iraq, in guerrilla mode, the Islamic State group is also residual in northern Egyptian Sinai. In Africa, the death, in 2021, of Adnane Abou Walid al-Sahraoui, the emir of EIGS, the Islamic State group in the Greater Sahara, has barely diminished the group. A branch from Boko Haram is also expanding autonomously towards the rest of Africa.
The Islamic State group is also active in eastern Congo and northern Mozambique. But it is mainly its Afghan branch, in Khorasan, which is today in a position of strength. With the attacks in Moscow in March 2024 and in Dagestan in June 2024, the intelligence services are worried about the rise in power of Daesh cells in Russia and the Caucasus.