Policy Assessment by Mustafa Al-Miqdad, Progress Center for Policies – Damascus
Introduction
The presence of the so-called “Islamic State” in Syria is no longer a passing phenomenon that can be explained by an isolated security incident or a bombing here and there. It has become a renewed field reality that goes beyond mere rumors of the group’s “return.” According to a 2025 report by the Carnegie Middle East Center, the activity of ISIS cells today stretches from southern Syria through the Rural Damascus area and Suwayda to Homs, Aleppo, and the Badia. This reflects the accumulated effects of persistent security, political, and social fragility over years following the collapse of the group’s former centralized territorial control. The newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat noted that ISIS exploits the political vacuum and the state’s preoccupation with reconstruction and restoring international relations to reactivate its cells. Meanwhile, data from the Combined Joint Task Force to Combat Terrorism (CJTF, 2025) indicates that ISIS relies on a small-cell, decentralized model, strengthening its ability to maneuver and exploit any security gap.
This paper aims to provide a field-based political reading of key questions: Why is ISIS showing this level of activity now? Who bears responsibility for this security expansion? And how can the fight against the organization be decisively and sustainably concluded—drawing on field data, media reporting, open-source intelligence, and the organization’s own official media.
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Analysis
• Monitoring ISIS activity reveals that the group no longer seeks to control wide territories; instead, it has shifted into a networked structure based on small, semi-independent cells. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR, 2025), these cells carried out more than 224 operations in northern and eastern Syria during 2025, resulting in approximately 98 deaths, including fighters, civilians, and members of ISIS itself. The Turkish outlet Shafaq News reported that these operations ranged from ambushes and assassinations to attacks on security patrols—indicating an ability to conduct distributed and varied operations despite reduced manpower.
• In eastern Deir ez-Zor, ISIS cells conducted qualitative attacks that killed five SDF fighters. The group also reactivated activity in southern Syria, including an attack in Suwayda using an improvised explosive device against a vehicle belonging to the “new Syrian forces,” reportedly the first such attack since late 2024 (Euronews Arabic, 2025). According to Al-Masry Al-Youm, ISIS exploited a partial drawdown of foreign forces to intensify operations in the Badia and Deir ez-Zor countryside, focusing on supply lines and sensitive sites.
• Field analysis suggests that ISIS combines concealment capabilities with exploitation of fragile social environments. Harsh economic conditions and the absence of services provide opportunities to recruit new elements or blend into local communities. ISIS targeted the Raqqa–Deir ez-Zor highway in 2024, causing losses among local militias—an indicator that operational structures capable of planning and striking within mobile networks remain present (An-Nahar, 2024).
• On the security response side, the SDF reportedly conducted more than 60 operations in 2025 targeting ISIS cells, leading to arrests including potential field leaders and improvements in intelligence and cell-movement monitoring (Syriac Press, 2025). Local and international reporting indicates that ISIS represents a long-term attritional threat: its strategy relies on poverty and social fragility, the recirculation of older weapons, and targeting areas with weak security coverage (SITE Intelligence Group, 2025).
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The Ideological Dimension: ISIS’s Excommunication of Ahmed Al-Sharaa’s Authority
The ideological dimension used by ISIS to justify its operations against Syria’s new authority cannot be ignored. According to ISIS statements circulated through its online media channels (SITE Intelligence Group, 2025), the group frames the fight against this bloc not as a political or security dispute, but as a faith-based battle with a claimed jurisprudential and “legal-religious” basis. It labels members of the new authority as “apostates” or “traitors to Islam,” and argues they must be fought under what it calls the rulings of takfir and jihad. ISIS asserts that targeting “the authority in Damascus” is religiously legitimate and not constrained by international humanitarian standards, presenting it as “defending doctrine and correcting the Islamic course,” grounded in extremist interpretations and a selective reading of jihad principles. According to Carnegie, ISIS uses these justifications to reinforce internal legitimacy and motivate recruits to execute precise operations against specific leaders and areas.
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Conclusion
• The available evidence shows that ISIS is not an invincible force, but neither is it a finished phenomenon. Its continued activity is linked to security vacuums, weakened oversight and sovereignty, the exploitation of economically and socially exhausted environments, and the fact that some local and regional actors do not prioritize its defeat.
• Overcoming this challenge requires a comprehensive approach that connects security with development and society. Strengthening intelligence capacities, precisely pursuing small cells, rebuilding trust between society and the state, and linking security measures to economic and social development are decisive steps. Experts emphasize the need to unify security decision-making, close “grey zones,” and rehabilitate targeted social environments to undermine ISIS’s ability to move and blend in.
• Victory over ISIS remains tied to the concept of an inclusive national state: one that protects citizens, monopolizes the use of force, and applies justice—while engaging local communities and separating counterterrorism from political blackmail.
• Success is possible if security decision-making is unified, full sovereignty is restored, the community is engaged in the confrontation, and counterterrorism is insulated from political leverage. Failure, by contrast, lies in the persistence of out-of-control zones of influence, rising poverty and unemployment, continued hate speech, and treating ISIS as a political pretext rather than a genuine threat.
