China's Wa State, Russia's Sahel Collapse, Colombia's Slide, and the ISIS Comeback

Across four continents, a single thread runs through the global disorder of mid-2025: where established powers and peace settlements once held the line, vacuums are opening, and the actors rushing to fill them are paramilitaries, proxies, and insurgents who answer to no government in any conventional sense. In Myanmar’s eastern mountains, China has found a way to guard its most valuable mineral deposits without sending a single soldier of its own. In the African Sahel, Russia’s mercenary apparatus is changing hands at the worst possible moment, as an al-Qaeda affiliate accelerates its campaign of slaughter.

In Colombia, a country that won a Nobel Peace Prize for ending its civil war is watching the promises of that settlement crumble. And in the deserts of Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State is quietly reassembling for a comeback that regional intelligence services increasingly believe is a matter of when, not if.

WarFronts has tracked each of these stories as it developed. Taken together, they describe a world in which the pandemonium of today is busy manufacturing the pandemonium of tomorrow. The common denominator is not ideology but opportunity: every one of these conflicts is being shaped by an actor that has identified a gap in someone else’s control and moved to exploit it, whether for rare-earth metals, gold, cocaine, or the wreckage of a collapsed regime. In each arena, the forces driving instability are gaining ground faster than the states responsible for security can respond, and in several cases those states are actively making it worse.

Key Takeaways

China is using Myanmar’s self-governing Wa State, a Chinese-armed and Mandarin-speaking quasi-vassal of roughly 750,000 people, as a deniable security force to lock down rare-earth mines after rebels disrupted its supply.
Almost half of the rare-earth metals and oxides China imported in early 2025 came from Myanmar; when Kachin rebels seized key mines in late 2024, Chinese imports of rare-earth compounds from Myanmar fell by nearly 90 percent.
Russia’s Wagner Group fled Mali on June 6, 2025, handing operations to the Africa Corps, which lost at least ten fighters within two weeks as the al-Qaeda affiliate JNIM escalated its campaign across the Sahel.
Colombia is facing its most severe security crisis since the 2016 FARC peace accord, with a senator shot in the head, coordinated bombings in Cali, and President Petro’s “Total Peace” ceasefire coinciding with record cocaine production.
ISIS is reactivating sleeper cells, moving weapons, and attempting jailbreaks across Iraq and Syria, exploiting the post-Assad power vacuum while a U.S. drawdown to as few as 500 troops widens the security gaps it intends to exploit.

China’s Secret Weapon in Myanmar: The Rise of Wa State

Myanmar’s civil war has long been a problem China prefers to manage rather than win. WarFronts has previously detailed China’s willingness to bend both sides of that war to its will, not out of any preference for the ruling military regime or the patchwork of ethnic rebel armies opposing it, but to protect the infrastructure and economic interests Beijing has spent years building across the country. China does not care who wins. It cares intensely that neither side destroys what it has built.

What has changed is the spotlight now falling on China’s most useful instrument inside Myanmar: the self-governing region of Wa State. Tucked into Myanmar’s east and divided between two mountainous, secluded patches of territory, Wa State is home to about three-quarters of a million people living under a one-party communist regime with its own civil authorities, its own military, and its own language. It is, for all practical purposes, indifferent to questions of sovereignty or international recognition: it openly accepts Myanmar’s claim to its territory, and its self-administered status is written into Myanmar’s constitution.

In every way that matters, though, Wa State functions as a Chinese vassal. One of its two enclaves borders China, the other Thailand. Its population speaks predominantly standard Mandarin, relies on Chinese goods, cell service, and currency, and arms itself with weapons supplied by Beijing. It also sits atop bountiful natural resources, especially tin and rubber, which China extracts largely for its own benefit in a comfortable, mutually agreeable arrangement with the Wa State government.

The Rare-Earth Stakes Behind China’s Maneuvering

China occupies a tricky but potentially lucrative position both inside Myanmar and on the world stage. Within Myanmar, it has gotten the ruling regime and the many rebel groups to respect its interests, but it is limited in its ability to expand those interests without pushing its own people into the crossfire. In broader geopolitics, China is working to dominate the United States and the wider West in mineral resources, especially the rare-earth metals it can wield as a bargaining chip in trade wars and long-term power struggles. According to exclusive reporting by Reuters, Wa State has become China’s answer to both problems at once.

The numbers explain the urgency. Rare-earth mines in Myanmar’s east harvest critical minerals vital for producing wind turbines, electric vehicles, and far more. According to Chinese customs data, almost half of the rare-earth metals and oxides China imported in the first part of 2025 came from Myanmar. Lose control of those mines, and China would risk other nations building rare-earth supply chains that begin in Myanmar, slipping those resources out from under Beijing’s nose and eroding the monopoly that gives it leverage over the West.

How the Kachin Tried, and Failed, to Squeeze Beijing

China’s anxiety about those mines is recent and specific. In late 2024, fighters loyal to the Kachin Independence Army, one of Myanmar’s many ethnic rebel groups, seized a band of mines that account for nearly half of the planet’s heavy rare-earth production. When the Kachin took control, Chinese imports of rare-earth compounds from Myanmar fell by close to 90 percent.

According to sources on the ground, the Kachin had intended to coerce China into cooperating with the broader rebel movement: if the group could throttle Beijing’s access to rare earths, especially by leveraging captured weapons caches to defend the mines, China might decide it was easier to cut a deal than to win the mines back by force. The Kachin even applied direct pressure, hosting officials from Indian rare-earth mining firms to explore a new commercial relationship.

It did not work. Rather than give in or intervene directly, China looked elsewhere in northern Myanmar, toward rare-earth deposits that had not yet been mined. The Kachin-held mines represent roughly half of the world’s rare-earth production, but production reflects only the deposits actively being worked at a given time, and Myanmar holds immense untapped reserves.

China moved fast to exploit them, opening new operations, tapping fresh deposits, and surging Chinese nationals into the area to harvest minerals around the clock. Those miners load extracted ore onto trucks, which travel roughly 200 kilometers to the Chinese border for processing.

A Proxy Army With No Chinese Boots on the Ground

Rather than station its own troops, China leaned on Wa State. The United Wa State Army now provides direct security over China’s new mining operations, an arrangement that suits a nation that prefers to keep its soldiers at home and has only recently begun deploying mercenary outfits comparable to Russia’s Wagner Group. Wa State is the cleaner option: it draws on manpower and military hardware already present in Myanmar, leans on the group’s substantial fighting strength, and lets Wa soldiers handle the secretive, dangerous work of protecting Chinese interests.

The Kachin, faced with a China that simply ignored the problem they created and set up operations it could control directly, have shown no appetite for trying to reclaim the new mines. Wa State is at least a fair match for the Kachin, and arguably more dangerous, and the Kachin already have their hands full fighting Myanmar’s military regime. Attacking China’s supply lines is one thing; attacking Chinese interests directly, with Chinese nationals on the ground, is something the Kachin almost certainly understand to be a horrible idea, since an assault on the new mines could provoke decisive unilateral action from Beijing. With China now getting what it needs without Kachin involvement, the rebels are locked into a financial contest in which Beijing can control prices, throttle exports, keep foreign investors out, and grind down the value of the Kachin’s economic weapon until it reaches zero.

What Wa State’s Expansion Means for Myanmar

The implications extend beyond the mines, to Wa State itself, which has shown an increasing willingness to venture beyond its enclaves. Wa State has recently massed troops near sensitive areas, including the city of Lashio, at moments when China has forced the handover of that territory from Myanmar’s rebels to the military regime. WarFronts has explored that pattern of strategic handovers before, but Wa State turning up in places like Lashio to pressure the rebels marks a significant change in how it operates.

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Wa State is militarily powerful relative to Myanmar’s other non-state factions, fielding relatively high-end weapons in a country where many rebel groups fought with single-shot hunting rifles until recently. It is rumored to possess surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, it is known to operate armored fighting vehicles and howitzer artillery, and it is rumored to have once possessed attack helicopters, though none appear to be flying now. The Wa boast some 30,000 active-duty troops, often forcibly conscripted from their families, and their numbers and equipment make them more than a match for any rebel group in Myanmar. Historically they have avoided trouble with those rebels, but if China is now directing them to actively guard Beijing’s interests, that dynamic could shift quickly.

With the Wa acting as security guarantors beyond their own borders, Beijing has new ways to protect its assets amid civil war. From a massive pipeline that would let China receive oil despite a hypothetical wartime blockade, to lucrative gold mines, to major Chinese business interests in Yangon and Mandalay, an enormous amount of Chinese capital is tied up in Myanmar. If the Wa can lock down the new rare-earth operations, China may ask what else they can accomplish: a few hundred troops to watch a pipeline, or to secure majority-Chinese neighborhoods when rebels push into a city.

If Myanmar’s military and rebels prove as unwilling to attack the Wa as the Kachin have been, the Wa could become the living embodiment of Chinese interests in a conflict where the risk to those interests determines who lives and dies, and a secure mining belt under Wa protection could let China open still more directly owned operations. Either way, China’s move to scale up mining and use Wa State to protect it signals more change ahead, in a conflict transforming from a struggle for self-determination into a resource war.

Russia’s Grip on the Sahel Is Slipping

From the jungles of Myanmar, the picture shifts to the arid badlands of the African Sahel, and to a crisis in which an al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadist insurgency called JNIM is making greater and greater gains. WarFronts published a standalone account of the conflict less than two weeks before the latest escalation, and the situation has only grown more dire since. JNIM has been running wild across the Sahel for some time, with many of the region’s nations under attack, but three sit squarely in the crosshairs. Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso are all led by military dictatorships established within the last few years, and all three have disengaged from their Western security guarantors in favor of closer alignment with Russia.

Over the past month and a half, JNIM has sharply accelerated. It killed several hundred soldiers across the three nations in May, then launched an asymmetric offensive centered on Mali in June. Hundreds of Malian soldiers have been killed, JNIM has struck the capital, Bamako, and the major city of Timbuktu with impunity, and after years deployed in Mali, the Russian-backed Wagner Group made a hollow declaration of victory and then fled.

Wagner Out, Africa Corps In, at the Worst Possible Moment

With Wagner’s departure on June 6, 2025, control of Russian operations in Mali shifted to another paramilitary group known internationally as the Africa Corps. Unlike Wagner, the Africa Corps is openly and transparently under the direct control of Russia’s Ministry of Defense, even though it is not a formal part of the Russian Armed Forces. The plan was for it to bring in fresh fighters, take over from Wagner, and resume work supporting the Malian regime and its two regional allies, not in the prominent combat role Wagner became known for but in a support posture: training Malian soldiers, protecting supply lines, and overseeing security in zones away from the front lines.

That plan unraveled almost immediately. Within the first two weeks, at least ten Africa Corps fighters were killed in two separate incidents, by roadside improvised explosive devices and an ambush on a convoy, and other reports suggest JNIM may have already brought down an Africa Corps helicopter. Beyond its own losses, the Africa Corps proved unable to prevent JNIM from setting off roadside bombs in the capital.

Elsewhere in Mali, JNIM attacked multiple mining camps where Chinese nationals oversee mineral extraction, killing several Chinese workers. In neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, JNIM struck a handful of military bases within days, inflicting casualties each time, and in one attack in Burkina Faso reportedly slaughtering dozens of soldiers.

Why the Africa Corps Is a Step Down From Wagner

Some of the early stumbles trace to the difficulty of setting up shop in an active war zone. Far less accustomed to the environment than Wagner, Africa Corps fighters may have been more easily targeted, and the force lacks the local connections and the relationships with Mali’s military, government, and ethnic militias that Wagner cultivated over years. It does include large numbers of former Wagner fighters, but they do not appear to be the same men who served in Mali under a new banner; they appear instead to be ex-Wagner personnel who took a deal to join after the death of Wagner’s leadership in 2023.

Reporting from Russia’s defense apparatus suggests Wagner’s exit had been planned for a while: according to some Russian milbloggers, the replacement had been underway since the start of the year, with new equipment shipped in for months. Even so, Wagner appears to have left sooner than expected, possibly in response to JNIM’s early-June attacks, with the Kremlin nudging it toward the door faster than planned. That implies Moscow has more confidence in the Africa Corps than in remnant Wagner elements, though it is not clear it should.

Pulling out fighters comfortable on the front lines and replacing them with advisors less willing to get their hands dirty, while security deteriorates this fast, is a significant gamble. Russia also can no longer write off losses as easily as it did with Wagner’s nameless mercenaries, and that ability to avoid reporting setbacks still matters on the home front. If the hope was that the Africa Corps’ lower profile would mean fewer setbacks, JNIM has already proved that wrong.

Wagner’s Wider African Retreat

The carefully planned departure in Mali comes amid reporting that Wagner may be pushed out of other African nations too. The most significant is the Central African Republic, where Wagner is deeply entrenched and, by some accounts, effectively runs the country through a puppet government. Reports have long circulated that Russia’s Ministry of Defense wanted to uproot Wagner from the CAR, but the nation’s president pushed back, insisting his personal bodyguards and several top Wagner advisers be allowed to stay.

According to the Institute for the Study of War, Wagner fighters in the CAR are a special case: highly influential in the timber and gold trades, and immune from many of the orders other Wagner elements have signed with Moscow. Still, Moscow appears to be pressing ahead, potentially even agreeing to a large Russian base the local government has sought, to guarantee its own security, since at least 2019. If uprooting Wagner from the CAR is worth the effort, its other deployments across the continent probably will not last long.

JNIM Pushes South Toward the Coast

JNIM, meanwhile, is still gathering strength and expanding its footprint across the Sahel and West Africa. According to recent reporting by The New York Times, the group is working its way into nations previously thought safe, like the Ivory Coast and Benin, where it finds a large pool of impoverished, ideologically flexible young men who may be eager to join. With American and European support for the region waning, border controls are breaking down even for relatively secure states.

Jihadists seek treatment in the Ivory Coast for wounds sustained in Burkina Faso, and rustle cattle or kidnap people from the Ivory Coast before retreating back across the border. A wave of violence is unmistakably working its way south toward the ocean, now straddling the line between the chaotic landlocked Sahel and the northern reaches of West African nations with southern coastlines.

Back in the three military regimes, ruling governments cannot stabilize even their own centers of power, let alone help their southern neighbors. In Mali, General Assimi Goita was granted another five-year mandate in legislation passed only days before this account. Goita has dissolved political parties and disappeared pro-democracy activists, while beginning work on a gold refinery built with a Russian conglomerate and nationalizing a gold mine previously controlled by the Canada-based Barrick corporation.

The regime frames these as steps to seize control of Mali’s mineral wealth, but it is far more interested in self-enrichment and power than in the jihadist crisis harming its people. It has even been forced to formally recognize local agreements between some rural communities and JNIM, with those communities pledging not to trouble the jihadists, and the jihadists, in return, agreeing not to massacre them.

In Burkina Faso, the picture is hardly different, with regime leader Ibrahim Traore building a personality cult while his army takes hundreds of losses at a time. In Niger, small-scale attempts to interrupt terrorist financing have fallen far short, while the government maintains a border standoff with neighboring Benin despite both nations facing the same enemy. A recent move by crisis-plagued Nigeria to re-engage diplomatically with the three governments might look like an opening for regional cooperation, but neither its government nor its security forces appear ready for a meaningful intervention.

For now, none of the three regimes appears on the brink of collapse: Mali is closest, while Burkina Faso’s capital is somewhat secure and Niger’s stable. But between JNIM’s relentless attacks, its growing reach, and the underwhelming Africa Corps, secure capitals do not equate to winnable conflicts. Each regime is consolidating power and then turning to Russian-sponsored resource extraction, precisely when JNIM holds a clear advantage in the countryside.

These nations are not yet on the verge of becoming a caliphate, but they risk being blinded by greed and complacency while JNIM and its allies take over the landscape. With time, secure lands, and a massive influx of southern fighters, JNIM could eventually mount attacks on major cities and even capitals, and if these states keep missing their chance, they may only grasp how badly their situation has devolved when it is already too late.

Colombia Is Sliding Back Into Violence

Nine years ago, Colombia was celebrated as a success story, a model for conflict-prone regions across the globe. In 2016, the Colombian state signed a peace agreement with its largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known by its acronym FARC. In return for political representation and land-rights reform, the leftist guerrilla group agreed to disarm and demobilize its roughly 13,000 combatants.

At the time, it felt as if negotiators had done the impossible. The conflict between FARC and the state had lasted over 52 years; at its height, the guerrillas operated in almost a third of Colombia’s territory. Smaller rebel groups like the National Liberation Army, or ELN, still remained, but there was hope they too could be brought to the table, and that for the first time in over half a century, Colombia might finally know peace.

Nearly a decade later, those dreams are crumbling. A spate of recent attacks has brought violence on a scale not seen in years, and all over the country there is a sense that a hard-won security is fading. As the Council on Foreign Relations recently put it, “Colombia is facing its most severe security crisis since its 2016 peace accord.” The triggers for these rising fears are many, but most can be traced to three major events since January.

Three Shocks: Bogota, Cali, and the Venezuelan Border

The most infamous took place on June 7, 2025, when conservative senator Miguel Uribe was campaigning in Bogota ahead of the runup to next May’s elections. The likely nominee of the Democratic Center party, Uribe was shot in the head by a teenage gunman, and at this writing remains in extremely critical condition. For outside observers, the assassination attempt echoed Ecuador’s 2023 presidential election, when anti-corruption candidate Fernando Villavicencio was murdered at an event in Quito, a killing that heralded the growing power of Ecuador’s cartels.

For Colombians, the shooting likely revived memories closer to home: between 1986 and 1990, five presidential candidates were assassinated. As The Economist noted, the June 7 shooting “is the most serious act of political violence in Colombia for 30 years.”

Three days later, on June 10, a string of 19 coordinated gun and bomb attacks shook the southwestern city of Cali and its surrounding areas, killing at least eight people and injuring 75 during five hours of terror. While some have tried to link the two incidents, the motive behind Uribe’s shooting remains a mystery. The Cali attacks, by contrast, have already been blamed on FARC dissidents who refused the 2016 peace deal and now operate under the name Central General Staff, or EMC.

But the worst display of violence so far came at the very start of 2025. In January, the far-left ELN launched an offensive against rival FARC dissidents along Colombia’s northern border with Venezuela. The fighting was so intense that some 20,000 civilians fled their homes.

At the height of the ELN’s operation, in February, the city of Cucuta imposed a 48-hour curfew on its population of one million as ELN fighters attacked local police stations with assault weapons. As The Guardian described it, “A conflict between rival armed groups spread to a regional capital in scenes residents said they had not witnessed since the cartel unrest of the 1990s.”

The Numbers Behind the Unease

These are not isolated episodes. The January outbreak of violence between armed groups in the Amazon killed 20 people, and the ELN placed thousands of civilians in the Choco region under a forced lockdown for three days. While Colombia is no stranger to such incidents, the sheer volume across 2025 is remarkable, and although it has not returned to anything near the instability of the 1990s, there is a growing feeling it may be sliding back toward a cycle of violence it had seemed to escape.

The figures bear this out. Since 2021, kidnappings have risen by 72 percent. The number of armed factions has jumped from 141 in 2022 to 184, and the Council on Foreign Relations records that the recruitment of children by armed groups has spiked by 1,000 percent since 2021. Other episodes have not yet entered the official tallies: a jump in grenade attacks in Bogota that had killed four people and injured nearly 30 by April, and the killing of 27 uniformed officers in just two weeks this spring, which BBC Mundo suggested resulted from cartels like the Gulf Clan deliberately targeting off-duty law enforcement.

This remains far from the violence of the 1980s and 1990s. After falling to a 42-year low of 24 homicides per 100,000 people in 2017, Colombia’s murder rate has stayed relatively stable, peaking at 26.2 per 100,000 in 2022 before falling to 25.4 the following year. By comparison, Ecuador’s murder rate skyrocketed in the years before its declaration of internal armed conflict, reaching an ungodly 44.5 per 100,000 in 2023. Colombia is not on the same trajectory just yet, but multiple signs point in the wrong direction.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

The obvious question is why. Why, a decade on from a peace process that won then-president Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize, have the promises of 2016 failed to materialize? For some, the agreement was far too lenient on FARC. For others, the fault lies with Santos’s successor, Ivan Duque, who failed to implement parts of the accord related to rural development. The truth may be all of the above, plus other factors, chief among them the law of unintended consequences.

Although officially a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement, FARC by its final decades had metamorphosed into the biggest and baddest cartel in the region. Illegal mining, growing coca leaf, drug smuggling: if it was lucrative, FARC had cornered the market, and not just in Colombia but in parts of neighboring Ecuador. So long as FARC ran the show, there was no point in other outfits trying to move in. But when the majority of its fighters voluntarily disbanded after 2016, it left a power vacuum across many rural regions that other groups rushed to fill.

The impact on Ecuador is already visible: the end of FARC’s dominance opened the cocaine market to Mexican cartels and Balkan mafias, who partnered with local groups and gave them so much money and firepower that they became impossible for Quito to control. In Colombia, the dynamics were different. Even as FARC disbanded, other armed groups stood ready to seize its territory: the ELN, FARC dissidents who refused peace, and the former paramilitary outfit turned drug cartel known as the Gulf Clan.

To stop turf wars, the Colombian state would have had to move in fast, but after a promising start in 2017, Bogota seems to have simply given up. As for why violence took so long to spike, other factors intervened: the economic upheaval of the pandemic, a host of local issues in individual regions, and the growing closeness between the leftwing regime in neighboring Venezuela and the ELN.

Petro’s “Total Peace” and the Cocaine Glut

This rising violence is also the product of choices made, including those of current president Gustavo Petro. Elected as Colombia’s first-ever leftwing leader in 2022, Petro pitched voters on “Total Peace,” a plan to open talks with all the nation’s remaining major armed factions, including some of the drug gangs, and finally end the low-intensity conflict that has gripped Colombia since 1964. Whether this was noble or naive can be debated all day. What is not up for debate is that its implementation seemed to amount to stopping bad things from happening, an undefined middle step, and then peace.

The government’s approach to the armed groups proved catastrophic. In January 2023, Petro declared a unilateral six-month ceasefire with multiple groups, from the FARC-offshoot EMC to the ELN; being armed groups, their response was to grab more territory. At the same time, Petro all but ended a long-running campaign to eradicate coca plantations.

In theory this made some sense: most coca leaf in Colombia is grown by poor farmers who lack alternative crops and supply the cartels purely to survive, and a big part of the 2016 deal was supposed to help them find alternatives. But like his predecessor Duque, Petro failed to support those alternatives, and where Duque at least kept up eradication, Petro’s decision to end it led to record-high cocaine production. As the Council on Foreign Relations describes what followed, “The Colombian cocaine glut flooded neighboring countries, like Ecuador and Brazil, helping transform their street and prison gangs into full-blown drug cartels, and contributed to increased drug overdose deaths in the United States and Europe.”

The effects inside Colombia were no smaller. The City Paper, an English-language daily, reported a poll in which a full 72 percent said Total Peace was off course, with a plurality citing public order and violence as their biggest concern. Yet for all that Petro may have exacerbated Colombia’s problems, the issues have been building for years.

The 2016 agreement looked like a landmark at the time, but a decade later the mismanagement is clear, from securing former FARC territories to dealing with coca farmers, all made worse by a lack of buy-in from wider society. Colombia today is still far safer than it was in the 1990s, but it is starting to feel as if it might be slowly slipping backward, and the hope can only be that the trend is reversed before it is too late.

The Islamic State Reactivates in Iraq and Syria

The final flashpoint is the Middle East, where a wide range of regional military, diplomatic, and political leaders are all sounding the same alarm at once: ISIS is coming back. It is the news that quite literally nobody wanted to hear, but if the rising consensus across the region is to be believed, it is the news we are stuck with. One of the most powerful jihadist insurgencies the modern world has seen, a landholding caliphate just a decade ago, is preparing for a comeback.

The signs are appearing all over the Middle East. Operatives are reactivating hibernating sleeper cells, and illicit weapons are moving across Iraq and Syria in greater numbers. ISIS propaganda is ticking up online, the group appears to have shifted into a recruiting phase, and operatives have already planned a number of attacks across the region.

This trend conflicts with the data on attacks the group has actually carried out, which have remained quite low through early 2025. But as more regional security experts point out, there is a vast difference between an ISIS that is not attacking because it has been diminished, and an ISIS that is waiting to attack because it is planning something much larger.

A note on nomenclature is worth making here. ISIS specifically means the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Other Islamic State branches, in places like Somalia, the Sahel, or Afghanistan, are the Islamic State but not ISIS. The distinction matters, because the resurgence under discussion is specific to Iraq and Syria.

Exploiting the Chaos of Post-Assad Syria

The key change ISIS is looking to exploit is the chaos of Syria after the fall of the Assad regime last December. As WarFronts has covered before, Syria has seen myriad ups and downs since Assad was ousted by a coalition of rebel forces, with sanctions lifted and significant progress made, but also massacres of Syrian Alawites, an Israeli occupation of southern territory, and ongoing struggles to reintegrate the autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava, all feeding instability. The idea that ISIS would exploit this is not new; it has been one of the greatest fears of regional experts ever since Assad abdicated. The group knows thousands of former fighters are imprisoned across Syria, waiting for an organized jailbreak, and that Syria’s new security forces have struggled to extend their authority across the country.

Regional security forces have proved somewhat effective in recent months. In Syria, ISIS pulled off fewer than 40 attacks from January to May, while Syrian forces disrupted several other plots and built up the intelligence needed to monitor the group; in mid-May, the government announced its first acknowledged raid against ISIS hideouts, killing three members and detaining four as it broke up a cell in Aleppo. In Iraq, ISIS launched just four attacks from January to May, well under ten percent of its 2024 total for that period, and Iraqi forces have repeatedly dismantled cells and struck hideouts before attacks could be carried out. Between the two countries, security officials say they have foiled at least a dozen ISIS plots since the start of 2025.

Why Low Attack Rates Tell Only Half the Story

A surface examination of Iraq and Syria would suggest ISIS is in retreat, but that tells only half the story. There are real logistical reasons for the group to have organically slowed its pace despite the opportunities of regime change. After being pushed out of its short-lived caliphate, ISIS pivoted into an asymmetric fight in the poorly patrolled Syrian deserts, where its fighters spent years hijacking oil shipments, extorting local communities, and smuggling weapons and finances. As a result, those fighters were not well positioned to take collective action when Assad fell in a lightning assault: the tactics needed to run an asymmetric jihadist crime ring are very different from those needed to seize and hold land for a new caliphate.

At the same time, the low attack rates relative to 2024 tell an underlying story. Even as ISIS attacks at far lower rates, its pace is slowly creeping upward, not with high casualty counts but with smaller-scale, more frequent operations that let the group consolidate resources, eliminate potential enemies, and gather money and weapons ahead of something bigger. According to Western intelligence sources, foreign fighters have started sneaking back into Syria, and ISIS is known to have attempted at least two jailbreaks aimed at freeing nearly 10,000 former fighters and their families held in detention centers monitored by Kurdish-led forces.

Estimates of ISIS fighters currently in Syria and Iraq range from one thousand roaming free to over three thousand, and the fighters it does have appear to be migrating out of the open desert and into Syria’s major cities, even as they distribute weapons captured from Assad-era supply depots before the new regime could secure them. Syrian officials have indicated ISIS is worming its way into the new Ministry of Defense while trying to recruit disillusioned former Assad soldiers.

The Detention Camps and the Coming Opportunity

The most consequential opportunity, with the greatest potential for devastation, is the new Syrian government’s effort to take over the Kurdish-run ISIS detention facilities in the east, while transferring some prisoners and sending foreign detainees home. That creates openings to attack vans carrying prisoners, to bring back foreign fighters who can re-enter more freely, and to assault the camps themselves during transition. Families released into Syrian society are unlikely to be tracked by a badly under-resourced government, and those who still harbor loyalty to ISIS may simply be recruited again.

When ISIS exploits these openings, the resurgence should look very different from the mid-2010s. The ISIS of the shock-and-awe campaign was genuinely dangerous, but many of its fighters were inexperienced, its leaders were often naive about coordinating a war effort, and it lost operational momentum rapidly once the tide turned. Now the Islamic State is a truly global movement, with franchise groups across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and its fighters in Iraq and Syria are far more pragmatic, more effective in combat, and more willing to play the long game in which a creeping jihadist insurgency is at its most dangerous.

The group has built robust financial networks worldwide, learned to smuggle high-impact personnel and weaponry, and moved its leadership to nations far safer than Syria or Iraq. If it senses an opportunity, it can flood in foreign fighters using smuggling networks not currently known in the public domain but which its recent tactics suggest it has already built.

Withdrawal, Corruption, and Two Unstable States

ISIS is operating in an environment where its target nations are growing more vulnerable. The United States is rapidly withdrawing from much of Syria, pulling out of nearly a dozen outposts and consolidating forces at one critical base. According to The New York Times, Washington intends to keep as few as 500 troops in Syria by the end of this drawdown phase, a quarter of what it had immediately after Assad fell.

Kurdish leaders have made clear the downsizing will leave a critical security gap, and Syria’s own security forces are nowhere near ready to hunt the group nationwide, even though the new leadership is bitterly opposed to ISIS in both principle and action. Iraq, for its part, suffers from a porous border, deeply corrupt government and security forces, a political crisis with its own Kurdish autonomous faction in the north, and, at this writing, status as a flyover nation for an escalating war between Israel and Iran.

ISIS does not merely have a short window to strike; it is balanced between two unstable nations whose governments, intentionally or not, are handing it greater advantages. As former fighters leave the Kurdish-run camps, as the Syrian government struggles to reconstitute, as Iraq is racked by turmoil, and as the U.S. looks to leave, ISIS can watch its position grow stronger. This is the core reason intelligence leaders are sounding the alarm even as the group’s attacks remain uncharacteristically slow.

To do something big, ISIS must reposition assets, distribute arms, and reorganize into a far more cohesive operation than asymmetric warfare required, and as it does, the powers of the region are making its job easier despite the occasional raid or killing of a senior leader. ISIS will happily absorb those decentralized, easily replaced losses, and it appears to be preparing for something that will see them repaid in kind against the people of Iraq and Syria. Whether that means coordinated mass killings, an attempt to claim Damascus, or a march on a vulnerable Iraq is anyone’s guess.

But whatever it is, neither Syria, nor Iraq, nor America, nor the rest of the world appears prepared to stop it.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Wa State, and why does it matter to China?

Wa State is a self-governing region in eastern Myanmar of roughly 750,000 people, with its own communist government, military, and Mandarin-speaking population, functioning as a Chinese vassal. Its roughly 30,000-strong army now secures China’s new rare-earth mining operations, letting Beijing protect critical mineral supplies without deploying its own troops. When Kachin rebels seized key mines in late 2024, Chinese imports of rare-earth compounds from Myanmar fell by nearly 90 percent, demonstrating just how strategically vital the region is.

What is the difference between Wagner and the Africa Corps in Mali?

Wagner was a Russian-backed mercenary group known for front-line combat that operated in a legal gray area. The Africa Corps, which took over after Wagner fled on June 6, 2025, is openly controlled by Russia’s Ministry of Defense and was expected to play a support role training Malian soldiers and protecting supply lines. Despite including many former Wagner fighters, it lost at least ten personnel within two weeks and proved less capable against JNIM than its predecessor.

What triggered Colombia’s current security crisis?

Three events in 2025 stand out: the June 7 shooting of conservative senator Miguel Uribe by a teenage gunman in Bogota; a string of 19 coordinated gun and bomb attacks in Cali on June 10 that killed at least eight people; and an early-2025 ELN offensive along the Venezuelan border that displaced some 20,000 civilians and imposed a 48-hour curfew on the city of Cucuta. The Council on Foreign Relations calls it Colombia’s most severe security crisis since the 2016 peace accord.

How did President Petro’s policies contribute to Colombia’s violence?

In January 2023 Petro declared a unilateral ceasefire with multiple armed groups, which responded by grabbing more territory. He also largely ended coca eradication without providing farmers viable alternatives, leading to record cocaine production that the Council on Foreign Relations says flooded neighboring countries and helped street gangs transform into full-blown drug cartels. A full 72 percent of Colombians surveyed said Total Peace was off course.

Why are intelligence agencies warning about an ISIS comeback when attack rates are low?

Experts distinguish between an ISIS diminished into inactivity and one deliberately holding back while it prepares something larger. The group is reactivating sleeper cells, moving weapons, ramping up propaganda, and has attempted at least two jailbreaks aimed at freeing nearly 10,000 former fighters held in Kurdish-run detention facilities. The collapse of the Assad regime and a planned U.S. drawdown to as few as 500 troops in Syria are widening the security gaps it intends to exploit.