WASHINGTON, October 1 (RIA Novosti), Lyudmila Chernova – In the wake of US-led airstrikes, the Islamic State (IS) group has adopted a new, hit-and-run tactic in densely populated areas aimed at putting civilians in the crosshairs to trigger an uproar, Gordon Hahn, an advisory board member at the Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, told RIA Novosti.
"Melting into cities will provide protection and force air attacks to target civilian-populated areas, facing the West with the prospect of mounting civilians casualties and the domestic political problems that will entail," the pundit told RIA Novosti.
Gordon Hahn said the tactic involved operating in small groups and "hunkering down," including melting away into civilian-populated urban environments, which amounts to "a strategic change of shifting at least temporarily from a conventional warfare posture (that includes terrorist tactics) to an insurgency model (that will also include terrorist attacks)."
Hahn said that reported advance of a portion of Islamist forces to within two miles of Iraq's capital Baghdad was worrying news. It makes one think whether their next move will be to infiltrate the city in numerous small groups and attack sensitive targets, including US forces stationed there.
He praised the recent success of US-led air campaigns that destroyed al-Qaeda affiliated Khorasan group's leader Amir Fadhli and Syria's Koniko gas plant that was believed to provide funds and cover for IS forces.
The expert pointed out, however, that both the United State and al-Qaeda linked jihadi groups, such as Khorasan and Jabhat al-Nusra, now shared the same goal of vanquishing the violent IS movement, which raised the question whether the Western coalition should really target IS-antagonistic insurgents.
It has been reported that Jabhat al-Nusra, the most powerful al-Qaeda affiliate in the region, is fighting alongside other jihadi groups against Islamic State insurgency in and around Soran Ezaz town in Aleppo.
"Will the US target non-IS jihadi groups after the presumed, though doubtful defeat of IS? Should the Western-led coalition do so now? If not, will not the degrading or defeating IS only boost al-Qaeda's place within the jihadi movement, especially if a decapitated IS begins to bleed fighters back to groups like Jabhat al-Nusra. It all begins to look like the very 'whack 'em all' futility that President Obama ridiculed a few months ago," the expert said in conclusion.
The Islamic State, also known as Isis or Isil, is a Sunni extremist group which has seized vast territories in Iraq and Syria, prompting US President Barack Obama to create an anti-IS coalition to conduct airstrikes against IS positions in Syria, while also continuing air raids against IS targets in Iraq.
