Aftandilian in The Arab Weekly on the Resilience of ISIS
Gregory Aftandilian, Lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent Op-Ed on the seeming resilience of ISIS despite major battlefield successes against the terrorist organization in Syria and Iraq.
Aftandilian’s Op-Ed, entitled “US Sees Many Reasons For Concern About Seeming Resilience of ISIS,” was published on September 2, 2018 in The Arab Weekly.
From the text of the article:
Despite major battlefield successes against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq, US officials are not dropping their guard against the terrorist organisation.
The extensive loss of territory once held by ISIS in the heart of the Middle East can be considered a victory for the United States and its coalition partners as well as for various indigenous forces, such as the Iraqi Army and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which suffered many casualties in the anti-ISIS campaign.
The ISIS self-declared caliphate is no more since Raqqa fell to the US-supported SDF last year. Symbolically, the caliphate had captured the imagination of many disaffected Muslims in the Middle East and the West and convinced thousands of them to travel to Syria to join the movement.
However, for at least some of these fighters, the caliphate’s demise showed that ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, were not invincible and its promise of creating a just society was a myth.
Aftandilian spent over 21 years in government service, most recently on Capitol Hill where he was foreign policy adviser to Congressman Chris Van Hollen (2007-2008), professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and foreign policy adviser to Senator Paul Sarbanes (2000-2004), and foreign policy fellow to the late Senator Edward Kennedy (1999).