Welcome to the era of ISIS – and pop-up terror

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[/audioplayer]Jihadist banners flying. Victorious extremists on camera slapping and then executing dehydrated and pleading Shia members of the Iraqi security forces. Dark reports of mass slaughter. City charters released in captured territory heralding the implementation of an extreme version of Islamic law. We’ve seen it all before, but it remains shocking — and the latest advance by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is arguably the most disturbing development in Iraq’s already horrifying recent history.

ISIS has surprised everyone by seizing a number of cities, but its success also raises the question: how long can the group sustain these gains? Media commentators have compared the situation now to the gains made by al-Qa’eda in the Islamic Maghreb, which in 2012 became the dominant force in northern Mali, and was able to enforce harsh religious rule over a broad stretch of territory, about 300,000 square miles. But that group eventually overplayed its hand. When it began to push out from Mali’s borders in January last year, that got everybody’s attention: France, supported by an alliance of West African states, mounted an intervention that dislodged the jihadists and forced many of them into hiding.

Several commentators have noted that ISIS is at risk of a similar overreach. It’s now fighting a multi-front war, across a large expanse of territory, with a limited number of fighters. And ISIS has now triggered a response not only from local players but from the international community too. As Ariel Ahram, an international relations professor at Virginia Tech University, puts it, ISIS’s advance will provoke ‘a re-alignment of political coalitions to resist or even crush it’.

Now, ISIS may not experience reversals as quickly as observers believe — it exhibited impressive staying power after its lightning offensive in January captured large parts of Fallujah and Ramadi — but they’re probably right to say that the group won’t sustain its territorial gains.