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The Islamic State is quietly rebuilding as the USA prepares to finish its withdrawal from Iraq, elevating fears the terror group could exploit a safety vacuum, a regional safety knowledgeable warned Sunday.
With U.S. forces leaving by Sept. 30 and as Baghdad tries to rein in Iran-backed militias, Iraq could also be getting into its most harmful interval since ISIS seized Mosul in 2014, based on counterterrorism knowledgeable Dr. Omar Mohammed.
“ISIS is waiting actively within the gaps, because it traditionally all the time has,” Mohammed, writer and researcher with the George Washington University Program on Extremism, instructed Fox Information Digital.
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The Islamic State is quietly rebuilding as the USA prepares to finish its withdrawal from Iraq, regional analysts say. (Historical past/Common Photographs Group through Getty Photographs)
“The query shouldn’t be whether or not American forces depart Iraq in September; that timetable is about. The query is what leaves with them.”
“The militias declare the ISIS menace with the intention to hold their weapons, whereas ISIS recruits from the grievances that the militias create,” Mohammed defined.
“That’s precisely the dynamic that hollowed out Mosul earlier than 2014, when town was caught between a sectarian safety equipment and the insurgency it fed.”
After getting ready for years, ISIS captured Mosul, about 250 miles north of Baghdad, over a decade in the past. Iraqi safety forces collapsed and fled town.
The group constructed underground networks by means of assassinations, extortion, intimidation and infiltration earlier than launching its offensive. ISIS seized U.S.-made weapons and a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} earlier than chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate.
On the time, Mohammed launched “Mosul Eye,” a weblog that secretly documented life below ISIS rule, exposing its operations and providing intelligence to U.S. forces.
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U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) has mentioned it can proceed working to dismantle ISIS networks and stop the fear group’s resurgence. (AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP through Getty Photographs)
Mohammed’s story is chronicled in Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS, out July 21 from Skyhorse Publishing, with a foreword by Pope Francis and an introduction by retired Gen. David Petraeus.
Iraqi forces, backed by the U.S.-led coalition, went on to recapture Mosul in July 2017. When the U.S. fight mission led to 2021, ISIS continued working in components of Iraq and Syria.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) has mentioned it can proceed working to dismantle ISIS networks and stop the fear group’s resurgence.
However, citing Iraqi intelligence estimates, Mohammed mentioned the variety of ISIS fighters in neighboring Syria has elevated from round 2,000 to as many as 10,000 because the collapse of Bashar Assad’s authorities in 2024.
Mohammed additionally mentioned the Fashionable Mobilization Forces, or PMF, an umbrella group built-in into Iraq’s safety forces, was by no means disbanded after ISIS’s territorial defeat.
He estimated the drive has about 238,000 members, receives billions of {dollars} in authorities funding and consists of factions with shut ties to Iran that function exterior the Iraqi authorities’s direct management.
With U.S. forces leaving by Sept. 30 and as Baghdad tries to rein in Iran-backed militias, Iraq may be getting into its most harmful interval since ISIS seized Mosul in 2014. (REUTERS/Mohammed Ameen)
Now Baghdad is making an attempt to deliver armed factions, together with Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, below full state management.
“Sept. 30 shouldn’t be one deadline; it’s two,” Mohammed mentioned, referring to the simultaneous U.S. withdrawal and the home disarmament push.
“The militias and ISIS aren’t separate tales; they’re deeply interdependent. Every actively justifies the opposite. Each forces thrive within the unstable areas the central state can’t maintain.”
The U.S. withdrawal additionally follows a 2024 U.S.-Iraq settlement that envisioned ending the mission in Iraq by 2025 whereas persevering with assist for anti-ISIS operations in Syria by means of September 2026. Mohammed warned in opposition to repeating previous complacency.
“Mosul didn’t fall in 2014 as a result of ISIS was robust. It fell as a result of all the pieces that will have detected its power—presence, consideration, trustworthy reporting from the bottom—had been withdrawn within the years earlier than, whereas the world’s eyes had been elsewhere.”
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U.S. President Donald Trump gestures towards Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi as they take part in a bilateral assembly within the Oval Workplace on the White Home in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 14, 2026. (Evan Vucci/Reuters)
In the meantime, Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s White Home assembly July 14, the place it was introduced remaining U.S. troops would go away Iraq, drew condemnation from Tehran.
Based on Iran Worldwide, Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei , known as al-Zaidi’s journey “regrettable” and claimed it broken Iraq’s dignity.
Mohammed mentioned Iran’s affect inside Iraq is necessary to Tehran after U.S. strikes degraded components of its proxy network.
“Iran’s strategic calculation issues extra now than at any level in a decade as a result of Iraq is basically what Iran has left,” Mohammed mentioned. “So the regime’s actual concern shouldn’t be resurgence. It’s irrelevance.”
Tehran fears an Iraq the place the federal government efficiently disarms the militias, U.S. forces depart on Baghdad’s phrases fairly than Iran’s, and no energetic safety disaster stays to justify armed teams working exterior full state management, he mentioned.
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“That mentioned, what occurs throughout the broader area after September won’t be determined by anybody’s acknowledged intentions or diplomatic guarantees,” Mohammed added.
“I’ve seen what a metropolis pays when that judgment is mistaken. Whether or not ISIS grows giant sufficient to frighten Iran, or stays simply giant sufficient to serve it, might be one of many defining questions of the 12 months after the withdrawal,” he warned.
Fox Information Digital has reached out to the White Home for remark.
