The deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday that killed 129 people and wounded around 350 more signaled a significant change in strategy for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the radical jihadist organization that has claimed responsibility.

“It underscores that this threat is real and that ISIS is not going to be content to consolidate its power in Iraq and Syria,” said Joe Felter, a former Colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces and senior research scholar Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

“They have demonstrated their ability to project power into foreign countries and conduct what I would call an “asymmetric strategic bombing capacity” in the form of these home-grown Western citizens who are willing to strap on suicide vests and blow up targets in support of ISIS directed objectives.

“They’re able to launch attacks with centralized planning and decentralized execution in a way that makes anticipating and interdicting them very difficult.”

French President François Hollande said that the attacks were “planned in Syria, organized in Belgium, perpetrated on our soil with French complicity.”

CISAC senior fellow Martha Crenshaw said the Paris attacks represented “a shift in strategy” for ISIS with the group “taking a more Al Qaeda-like stance and striking Western countries.”

However, she emphasized that the carefully planned nature of the coordinated strikes, where multiple teams carried out simultaneous attacks in three locations across downtown Paris, indicated that this new strategy had been secretly underway for some time.

“These attacks were planned a long time ago,” said Crenshaw, whose Mapping Militants Project includes more information on groups like ISIS.

“You shouldn’t think they’re reacting to very recent circumstances…It’s not like we bombed them one day and the next day they planned these attacks.”

Apocalyptic visions

ISIS has long advocated a plan of provoking the West into a larger confrontation that would lead to an apocalyptic victory for Islam, according to Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford and an affiliate at the Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law.

“There’s a lot of method to this madness,” Milani said.

“If you read their literature, they have always talked about creating this sort of mayhem.”

ISIS’s propaganda magazine Dabiq, which is available online in Arabic and English, is named after a village in Syria with important symbolism for jihadists.

“They claim that the prophet has predicted that if you can get the West to come and fight the Muslims at Dabiq, then Islam will conquer the world,” Milani said.

Unlike France’s earlier battles against extremists in Algeria, it cannot rely on a proxy state to take the fight to the terrorists, according to Crenshaw.

“When terrorism in France has its origins in Algeria, France could rely on the Algerian state to crack down on these groups,” she said.

“Now you’ve got a situation where the planners are in a country where you don’t have a reliable state to go in and get them for you and wrap up their networks.”

With French warplanes already bombing targets in the Syrian city of Raqqa, Felter warned against the limits of air power in the fight against ISIS.

“There’s a risk that as we ramp up the bombing campaign and increase civilian casualties, this does play into the narrative of these extremists,” he said.

“It’s a very difficult targeting process. ISIS has occupied urban areas full of non-combatants and civilians…It’s the ultimate human shield.”

Felter acknowledged that increasing the number of US ground forces sent to interdict ISIS in Iraq and Syria may ultimately be necessary, but also that this increased presence, if not managed carefully, could backfire.

“At some level, they want to bring Western military forces to occupy these lands, because that will help turn popular opinion against the West and aid in their propaganda and recruitment,” he said.

The fight against ISIS is not limited to the territories it claims in the Middle East. It must be a global effort and include increased international cooperation and information sharing across intelligence, law enforcement and other agencies around the world, Felter said.

ISIS wants to drive a wedge between Europeans and the growing Muslim communities in their countries, so recruiting French citizens to participate in the Paris attacks served a dual purpose, Milani said.

“Using French citizens helps them with logistics, but it also helps them in terms of their strategy in that it makes it difficult for Muslims to live in a non-caliphate context,” he said.

Failed states problem

In the wake of the attacks, European nations are working to create legislation that would toughen criminal penalties for citizens who travel abroad to fight with designated terrorist organizations such as ISIS, or strip them of their citizenship, according to CISAC affiliate Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, a former executive director of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service.

Individuals who are seen as inciting people to travel to Syria and Iraq to join the jihad could also face tougher sanctions, she said.

The emergence of ISIS and its nihilistic theology is a symptom of broader underlying problems in the Middle East, which is grappling with failed and failing states across North Africa and in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to Milani.

“ISIS is the most militant and brutal manifestation of something deeper that’s going wrong,” he said.

“I honestly have never seen the Middle East as perilously close to complete chaos as it is now… [and] I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it yet.”

Resources & links

Get more background on the Islamic State and its leaders from Martha Crenshaw’s Mapping Militants Project

Is There a Sunni Solution to ISIS? – The Atlantic | By Lisa Blaydes & Martha Crenshaw

Airstrikes Can Only Do So Much to Combat ISIS – New York Times | By Joe Felter

The Super Smart Way to Dismantle ISIS – The National Interest | By Eli Berman, Joe Felter & Jacob Shapiro

The Rise of ISIS and the Changing Landscape of the Middle East – Commonwealth Club of California | Abbas Milani

On November 10, CDDRL and the WSD Handa Center for Human Rights and International Justice welcomed Human Rights Watch's Director of Emergencies Peter Bouckaert and Sareta Ashraph, senior analyst on the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, for a discussion on the ongoing human rights and refugee crises in Syria. The talk was moderated by Stanford Law School's Beth Van Schaack, Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights.

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NATO must bolster its presence in Europe as a way to counter Russian aggression in the region.

That was the message from General PHILIP M. BREEDLOVE, the supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), when he visited Stanford on Monday.

“Europe is clearly at a crossroads,” he said.

Breedlove addressed the need for a strong NATO amid the evolving geopolitical climate in Europe. Of great concern are Moscow’s intrusions into Ukraine, Crimea and Georgia in Eastern Europe in recent years.

“We have to recalibrate what we’re thinking,” he said. NATO is building up its troop rotations to deal with hostile moves in the region, for example.

Breedlove spoke to a couple hundred people at the Koret Taube Conference room in the Gunn Building. Breedlove’s speech was sponsored by The Europe Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).

“Highly dynamic” is how Breedlove described Europe’s security situation as a resurgent Russia seeks to “rewrite” the rules of international order. “They have been aggressive and coercive in their use of diplomatic, military and economic tools,” he said.

Lies and distortions characterize Russia’s attempt to change borders and bully its neighbors, Breedlove added. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s greater goal is to destabilize NATO and chip away at the alliance. Russia is acting in the east, south and north of Europe, including forays into the Arctic Circle and near Japan.

“This is all about extending Russian control” over its neighbors, Breedlove said.

Massive, seemingly endless migration coming from the Middle East into Europe poses a monumental crisis, he added. “The situation is creating serious political problems for political leaders” in European countries, he said. On top of this, possible terrorists and foreign fighters within the sheer numbers of migrants are extremely difficult to track, he added.

These European and NATO challenges intersect in the case of Syria and Russia’s involvement there, Breedlove said. “Russia’s striving to project [itself] as a world power.”

Syria is an opportunity for Putin to shift the world’s attention from his country’s aggressions in the Ukraine to the Middle East, he said. Breedlove disputed Putin’s rationale – fighting ISIS and terrorism – for intervening in Syria. “There’s a clear gap between his words and actions.”

Time will tell if Russia overextends itself in its adventurism, Breedlove said. For NATO, it must “rebuild its capacity” to address such threats. “Defend territory, people and values” is how he defined NATO’s mission.

A free, peaceful and prosperous Europe is much more attractive to the world than a menacing Russia that lacks similar values and attributes, he noted.

The security of Europe is Breedlove’s “daily business,” said MICHAEL MCFAUL, director of FSI. “You could not have a more well informed person speak about European security.”

McFaul noted that a new initiative series on European security, sponsored by the Europe Center, will bring other speakers and events to campus.

Breedlove, a distinguished graduate of Georgia Tech’s ROTC program, has flown combat missions, mostly in the F-16 jet, and has served as vice chief of staff for the U.S. Air Force and commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe and Africa.

“I feel right at home, because this is the type of weather we have in Belgium,” he quipped on a rainy day at Stanford.

This article was originally published in The Stanford Report on November 9, 2015.