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June 21st, 2015 
David Schulberg 
Using geolocation data from some 4,000 entries, a team of analysts has scrutinized tweets and YouTube videos by Islamic State militants and managed to track their movements in Iraq and Syria, and map major and minor attacks by ISIS.
Islamic State (formerly ISIS/ISIL) currently has about one-third
of Iraq and Syria under its control, including Iraq’s
second-largest city, Mosul. The data collected by the
Britain-based analysts from IHS Conflict Monitor shows how ISIS
forces are pushing toward Damascus and Baghdad, according to AFP.
“Islamic State is shifting its attention to the weakened
Syrian government at the expense of losing territory to the Kurds
in northern Syria,” the head of Middle East analysis for
IHS, Firas Abi-Ali, told AFP.
“We see the group’s operational reach goes far beyond the
territory it controls,” he stated, adding that this is a
“continually expanding project, there is no limit to where
they would stop.”
The IHS team began the mapping project and ranking the
reliability of sources nearly nearly a year and a half ago.
“What we’ve seen in the Syrian conflict is groups over-reporting
their activity to gain credibility. There were a lot of
unsubstantiated claims that one side or another was
winning,” the head of Middle East analysis for IHS noted.
The IHS data from March to May reportedly shows that IS decided
against launching offensives against Kurdish forces on the
northern front, for fear this would make its forces prone to
airstrikes.
“Neither the Kurds nor the Islamic State appear interested in
changing that front line,” Richard Jackson, deputy head of
political violence forecasting at IHS, stated.
“That frees up IS fighters to push towards the
capitals.”
The only exception, according to Jackson, has been the
strategically important town of Tal Abyad, a key link between
Turkey and the northern Syrian city of Raqqa (also used by ISIS
as a major channel of commerce from where it smuggles in foreign
fighters and sells oil on the black market) which the Kurds
recaptured from ISIS this week.
“They’re not strong enough to take Damascus because the
strong Sunni threat in that region is [Al-Qaeda affiliate] Jabhat
Al-Nusra and Jaish Al-Islam, Jackson said, but they will push
towards the Damascus-Homs road,” cutting off Bashar Assad
from his Alawite community’s stronghold of Latakia.
“Damascus is important, but Latakia is their home,” Jackson
told AFP. “That frightens Assad supporters.”
READ MORE: Geo-jihad: New Zealand militant
accidentally tweets his Syria location
IS fighters couldn’t care less to hide their whereabouts on
social media, and this has been playing into the analysts’ hands.
“They rely heavily on their mobility, they move between
battlefronts quite quickly and effectively, so they are less
worried about giving away their location,” Abi-Ali said.
According to AFP, the IHS data shows IS pushing into the Iraqi
capital, with as many as 70 explosive device (IED) attacks in
Baghdad between February and April, plus three suicide bombings.
“This is about undermining the enemy’s will to fight,” according
to Abi-Ali. “In their grander aspirations, it’s about
inflicting enough casualties that you bring down the government
or spark an exodus of the enemy population.”
Some ISIS operatives used to be intelligence agents under former
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, IHS told AFP.
“They have really well-structured sleeper cells,” Jackson
said. “The beards come off. They speak against the Islamic State
to see who disagrees. It’s divide and conquer.”
READ MORE: Female jihadist geo-tracked from Canada to
ISIS frontline
ISIS could meanwhile give other militant groups, like Al-Qaeda,
an opportunity to reinstate themselves.
“Al-Qaeda tends to work with a group to take over an area and
then back off, letting the local group run it,” Jackson
said, citing examples in Yemen and Syria.
“That sort of cooperative approach is more likely to pay
dividends than the IS approach of mass executions and killing all
the dissenters. But that’s long-term, and we’re talking
years.”
According to the US State Department’s latest global terrorism
report, terror acts rose by more than one-third from 2013 to
2014, while deaths nearly doubled. Boko Haram and the Islamic
State were mainly responsible for a hike in the atrocities.
Nearly 33,000 people were killed in about 13,500 terror attacks
across the world in 2014, while terrorism-related kidnappings
nearly tripled, going up from 3,137 in 2013 to 9,428 in 2014, the
report said. Terror attacks occurred in 95 countries in 2014, yet
the bulk tool place in the Middle East, South Asia, and west
Africa.
Along with the Islamic State’s recruitment abilities and
expansion into Libya, Egypt and Nigeria, the report emphasized an
“unprecedented seizure” of territories in Syria and Iraq
by ISIS in 2014.
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Careless ISIS use of Twitter & YouTube enables analysts to track militants’ movements
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