ISIS Still on the Attack, Despite Internal Strife and Heavy Losses

By The New York Times

The Islamic State is facing growing dissension among its rank-and-file fighters and struggling to govern towns and villages it has seized, but the militant Sunni group is still managing to launch attacks and expand its ideological reach outside of Iraq and Syria, senior American officials said.

In the seven months since allied warplanes in the American-led air campaign began bombing select Islamic State targets, the Sunni militancy, while marginally weaker, has held its own, senior defense and intelligence officials said.

 

Pentagon officials expressed only cautious optimism on Thursday after the Islamic State lost much of the central Iraqi city of Tikrit following more than a week of fierce fighting, warning that it would be as difficult for Iraqi forces to hold the city as it was to liberate it. And even as the militants made a last stand in Tikrit, Islamic State fighters were mounting one of the fiercest assaults in months in the city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad.

 

But in recent months tensions have become apparent inside the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh. The troubles stem from new military and financial pressures and from the growing pains of a largely decentralized organization trying to hold together what it views as a nascent state while integrating thousands of foreign fighters with Iraqi and Syrian militants.

 

The tensions were described in recent interviews with a Syrian fighter who recently defected from the group and an Islamic State recruiter who still works with the group but is critical of some of its practices. The troubles were consistent with accounts from residents of areas that the Islamic State controls and from interviews with numerous Syrian activists who oppose both the Islamic State and the Syrian government. Those activists have recently fled from those areas but maintain extensive contacts there.

 

There are reports of dozens of executions and imprisonments of Islamic State fighters trying to flee the group. There are strains in fighting on multiple fronts, with some fighters being deployed to battles that, they complain, are not strategically important. There are complaints about salaries and living conditions, disputes over money and business opportunities, and allegations that commanders have left with looted cash and other resources.

 

And there is growing anecdotal evidence that some members of the group — particularly locals who may have joined out of opportunism or a sense that it was the best way to survive — have been repulsed by its extreme violence.

 

“I still feel sick,” Abu Khadija, the Syrian defector, said recently after witnessing what he said were the beheadings of 38 Kurdish and Alawite war prisoners by Islamic State fighters in Yaroubiyeh, a Syrian town on the Iraqi border. Abu Khadija asked to be identified only by his nickname for his safety.