Islamic State leader Abdullah Qardash was killed in a US raid in Syria on Feb. 3, but his death did little to kill the murderous ideology driving ISIS or its desire to topple Arab regimes and bring about the birth of a super-caliphate predicated on the principles of early Islam and free of "modern" interpretation and "foreign influences."
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This ideology remains alive thanks to the tireless attempts by ISIS operatives from Morocco to Pakistan to gain momentum despite the crippling blows the terrorist group has sustained.
ISIS was formed in 1999 but only gained global notoriety in 2014 when it began seizing control of areas in Iraq. Since the 2019 elimination of self-professed Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State has lost most of the territory it overran in the Middle East, dozens of key leaders and countless operatives, who are systematically eliminated. A Jordanian intelligence report said recently that ISIS has now shrunk to only a few hundred official members.
ISIS cells pledge allegiance to its leaders as soon as they are named and attempt to carry out terrorist attacks to fuel the group's momentum. These efforts manifest not only in the form of organized terrorist cells but also in the form of lone-wolf terrorists, who receive their training online and are fueled by ISIS propaganda on social media.
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for last week's terrorist attack in Beersheba and Sunday's terrorist attack in Hadera. Bedouin terrorist Muhammad Abu Qi'an, who murdered four Israelis in Beersheba, and cousins Iman and Ibrahim Agbaria who killed two Border Police officers in Hadera, were ISIS sympathizers, as clearly evident from their social media presence.
The Negev Summit was a golden opportunity for ISIS to remind the world that the ideology seeking to undermine order in the Middle East is here to stay.
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