Strategy shift for ISIS: Inflicting terror in distant lands

WASHINGTON – Defying Western efforts to confront the Islamic State (IS) on the battlefield, the group has evolved in its reach and organizational ability, with increasingly dangerous hubs outside Iraq and Syria, and strategies that call for using spectacular acts of violence against civilians.

But even as the militant attacks were playing out across Paris on Friday night, the United States carried out an air strike – planned days in advance – against the IS leader in Libya, which has emerged as a pivotal stronghold for the group in North Africa. The US and British Special Operations forces have for months been conducting secret surveillance missions in Libya to monitor the rise of fighters aligned with IS.

The massacre in Paris on Friday, following bombings in Beirut and the downing of a Russian passenger jet over Egypt, all claimed by IS, reveals a terrorist organization that has changed in significant ways from the West’s initial understanding of it as a group focused on holding territory in Syria and Iraq and building a caliphate, or Islamic state.

Actions by the US and its allies – including a Western bombing campaign of IS-held fighting positions and oil facilities, coordinated with a ground offensive by Kurdish forces to cut off a major supply line – foreshadow how the West might respond to the growing menace in the coming weeks.

The IS, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, has for the first time engaged in what appears to be a centrally planned campaign of terrorist attacks aimed at inflicting huge civilian casualties on distant territory, forcing many counterterrorism officials in the US and in Europe to recalibrate their assessment of the group.

“They have crossed some kind of Rubicon,” said William McCants, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of “The ISIS Apocalypse.” “They have definitely shifted in their thinking about targeting their enemies.”

When the IS Egyptian arm claimed responsibility for blowing up a Russian charter plane over Sinai two weeks ago, some analysts wondered if the group’s Sinai Province of the Islamic State had acted on its own and leapt out in front, even at the cost of risking a Russian military backlash on the parent group in Syria and Iraq.

But the attacks last week in Paris and Beirut, which the IS also said it carried out, appear to have settled that question and convinced even skeptics that the central leadership was calling the shots.

“There is a radical change of perception by the terrorists that they can now act in Paris just as they act in Syria or Baghdad,” said Mathieu Guidère, a terrorism specialist at the University of Toulouse. “With this action, a psychological barrier has been broken.”