Less than a week after Abu Bakr al Baghdadi detonated himself rather than risk capture, the Islamic State named his successor. “We give our obedience to the commander of the faithful, the caliph of the Muslims, Abu Ibrahim al Hashimi al Qurayshi, pledging to listen and obey, in times of delight and dislike, and in times of hardship and ease, and to do so selflessly,” the group’s new spokesman announced.
Little is known about al Qurayshi. The announcement omitted any biographic details, so even basics such as nationality, age, and previous role within ISIS are unknown. The demonym al Qurayshi suggests descent from the Prophet Muhammad’s family, but that could easily be a cynical ploy to buy religious legitimacy for a man who might not have arisen from such lofty stock. Such anonymity amplifies the aura of mystery around the new caliph, but is also practical: After Baghdadi’s death, security is paramount. The less external intelligence agencies know about al Qurayshi, assuming he is even a single person rather than a composite, the better for ISIS’s inner circle.
But can a reclusive figure run a caliphate? The short answer is yes. While Osama bin Laden may have avoided the use of cellphones and the internet to evade detection, he maintained tight control via courier. Documents seized from bin Laden’s Pakistan compound in 2011 showed bin Laden’s day-to-day control was far greater than intelligence analysts had previously believed. Of course, it was by tracking relatively low-level al Qaeda couriers rather than waterboarding high-profile suspects that U.S. forces ultimately located bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Regardless, ISIS is adaptable. The flood of foreign fighters from over 100 counties into Syria and Iraq following Baghdadi’s original declaration of the caliphate showed just how much resonance the institution of the caliphate has. And from the very beginning, Baghdadi planned for his movement to outlive him. Turki al Binali, a Bahraini scholar who served as ISIS’s chief mufti, said the Prophet Muhammad had predicted 12 true caliphs prior to the end of the world and that Baghdadi was No. 8. If al Qurayshi succeeds, it will confirm for ISIS followers that he’s No. 9; if he fails, his acolytes will simply believe they must try again to find the next true caliph in line.
While ISIS’s Shura Council appointed al Qurayshi, the new caliph will still be compelled to prove himself to lieutenants who may feel themselves better suited to carry forward the ISIS banner. Consider, for example, the aftermath of bin Laden’s death. Al Qaeda appointed Egyptian dentist Ayman al Zawahiri but, in short order, many regional leaders staged attacks to seek, through shock, awe, and the blood of infidels, to stake their claim to leadership. Eleven days after bin Laden’s death, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the closest al Qaeda faction in Pakistan, killed 80 in a dual suicide bombing outside of Peshawar. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula tried to smuggle a bomb aboard a plane bound for the United States and, in January 2013, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the leader of al Mourabitoun, a relatively small group operating in Mali, Algeria, and southern Libya, took over 800 workers hostage at a southern Algerian gas plant. Ultimately, 37 hostages died; Belmokhtar subsequently became a key figure in al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, although various reports suggest he was later killed.
The hard lesson, then, is this: Whether al Qurayshi succeeds or not, the West must prepare itself for a spike in ISIS terrorism.
ISIS may no longer govern territory in Iraq and Syria as it did two years ago, but it retains surprising breadth. It has flourished amid chaos in both Libya and Yemen and has made huge swaths of the Sahel, the African region that stretches from Mauritania to Sudan, a no-go area for both Westerners and national governments. The Egyptian military has battled an ISIS affiliate in northern Sinai for more than eight years without clear success. In Somalia, al Shabaab threatens a resurgence. Perhaps the most potent ISIS affiliate today is in Afghanistan, where the group’s Khorasan branch is establishing itself as a more potent and lethal alternative to the Taliban. Leaders in each of these regions may use Baghdadi’s death to accelerate the violence that ISIS has previously used to build momentum and recruit.
The broader question is not whether al Qurayshi can run ISIS, but rather what shape the group might take under his leadership. In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, an active debate erupted among al Qaeda’s senior leaders and tacticians both about the wisdom of centralization and the necessity or even desirability of holding territory. Al Qurayshi now faces the same questions: Centralization bolsters the absolute power of the caliph but may be impractical with adherents scattered across nearly 5,000 miles, from the deserts of Mauritania to the mountains of Afghanistan. Likewise, al Qaeda has largely abandoned the notion of holding territory, instead focusing on scattered cells plotting disparate terror attacks.
One key difference: Al Qaeda does not claim to be a state. If al Qurayshi retains ambitions for ISIS to live up to its name, then the group will need to hold territory in which it can impose an order inspired by Islamic law and the Prophet Muhammad’s early example. This is ISIS’s brand, and it is unlikely the group can continue to recruit if it can no longer promise the its followers slaves and salaries—the types of benefits that require territory and a state bureaucracy—or offer a way of life harking back to Islam’s golden age.
In all likelihood, then, al Qurayshi will look for new territory in which to establish his protogovernment. Iraq and Syria are unlikely locations, given ISIS’s previous defeat and the presence of Russian, Turkish, Iraqi, Syrian, Iranian, and American forces in close proximity. Afghanistan may be a better option: The White House and State Department say U.S. Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad are negotiating a peace agreement with the Taliban, but Afghans say it is, in effect, just a withdrawal agreement. The result will be a vacuum, which neither the Afghan government nor the Taliban would able to fill.
While the Taliban promote a vision of an Islamic Afghan emirate, ISIS’s rejection of traditional nationalism in favor of a caliphate may make it an attractive alternative not only for many Afghans and other local Islamists but also for the foreign fighters who have now spent decades in and around Afghanistan and may not want to return home to Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and other areas where governments are hostile to their jihad.
The wild card in determining ISIS’s future may very well be Turkey. While President Trump, NATO leaders, and many diplomats continue to operate under the fiction that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is an ally in the fight against ISIS, a growing body of evidence suggests the opposite. U.S. forces found Baghdadi within just a few miles of the Turkish border, in an area where there is a heavy presence of Turkish proxies and intelligence operatives. That Kurdish intelligence contributed to his death—but Turkish intelligence did not—raised questions about whether Turkey sought to protect him and whether Baghdadi was ultimately aiming to seek haven in Turkey itself. Taha Abdurrahim Abdullah, a close aide to Baghdadi who was captured by Kurdish forces in March 2019, has told interrogators that Erdoğan had, in 2014, ordered ISIS to attack the Kurdish-held city of Kobane rather than concentrate its forces against Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus. Other reports suggest Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization and ISIS made a deal that same year that included a prisoner swap and supplies. If Erdoğan continues to double deal on ISIS, he could grant the would-be caliphate a new lease on life within Syria or Iraq in exchange for influence and immunity from attacks inside Turkey, in much the same way Pakistan has traditionally played a double game with not only the Taliban but also al Qaeda, as bin Laden’s refuge inside Pakistan showed.
So, where goes ISIS? Al Qurayshi has, at his disposal, a menu of decisions and options, each of which would take the caliphate down very different paths. The only certainty at this point is that Baghdadi’s experiment is likely to survive his demise. ISIS’s continued resonance among a subset of extremist Islamists worldwide, meanwhile, will make Baghdadi’s death simply the conclusion of a chapter rather than the end of the story.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
