The global threat posed by Daesh has not been diminished by its battlefield defeats in Iraq and Syria, US counterterrorism chief Nick Rasmussen has warned.
Rasmussen told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that he expects the group, after losing its physical territory, to become a covert operation that will still conduct and inspire attacks around the world.
“There is not, in fact, a direct link between ISIS’ (Daesh) battlefield position in Iraq and Syria and the group’s capacity to inspire external attacks,” he said.
“The ISIS ability to reach globally is still largely intact,” said Rasmussen, who has been director of the National Counterterrorism Center since 2014.
In recent months US-led coalition forces have expelled Daesh from its key Iraq strongholds of Mosul and Tal Afar and they are close to eliminating it in Raqqa, Syria.
This has forced the remnants of the radical army down into the middle Euphrates River valley where a last-stand siege is expected.
But Rasmussen said the group is and will continue to be able to recruit followers around the world, ready to undertake attacks.
When its defeat on the battlefield is final, he said, US terror experts expect it to revert to the form it took in an earlier incarnation as Al-Qaeda in Iraq insurgency of 2004 to 2008.
“Winning on the battlefield in places like Mosul and Raqqa is a necessary but an insufficient step in the process of eliminating the ISIS threat to our interests,” he said.
“It’s simply going to take longer than we would like to translate victory on the battlefield into a genuine threat reduction.”

Source: Arab News