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Analytic Memo 12: Final Assessment: The Persistent Threat of ISIS

by Dack Anderson, Lead Security Consultant

Illustration generated by Copilot, Microsoft's AI companion, based on a custom design prompt. May 31, 2025.
Illustration generated by Copilot, Microsoft's AI companion, based on a custom design prompt. May 31, 2025.

As part of my academic journey at Pikes Peak State College, I had the opportunity to study ESA4010: Terrorism Threat & Risk Analysis in 2022, a critical course that deepened my understanding of terrorism-related threats, emergency response strategies, and analytical methods. Under the guidance of Professor Woody Boyd, I conducted extensive research using structured assessment models to analyze whether ISIS remains a threat to the United States.


This twelfth and concluding annex synthesizes core findings from my 2022 capstone and integrates vetted, open-source assessments from 2023–2025 to provide an updated, evidence-informed evaluation of ISIS’s capabilities, intent, and ongoing risk to U.S. interests and partners.


Key Findings (2022 Synthesis)

  • ISIS is ideologically resilient and tactically adaptive; territorial defeat did not erase its narrative or appeal.

  • The organization operates as a decentralized network: a diminished central core with active, semi-autonomous affiliates (wilayat) that vary in goals, tactics, and leadership.

  • ISIS exploits weak governance, socioeconomic grievances, and conflict zones to recruit, train, and project power locally and regionally.

  • The group weaponized social media and encrypted communications to radicalize, direct lone actors, and propagate operational guidance.

  • Human-rights abuses, including slavery and use of child combatants, were institutional tools for control and recruitment that reinforced ISIS’s internal cohesion.


Developments since 2022

  • U.S. and allied assessments confirm ISIS remains a persistent global threat and has sought to reconstitute capabilities following territorial losses; intelligence reporting warns the group will exploit regional instability to rebuild external attack capabilities (Department of Homeland Security, 2024; Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2025).

  • Affiliates in Africa, the Sahel, and South/Central Asia expanded operational capacity, conducting lethal local attacks and leveraging weak governance to entrench themselves (Stanford CISAC, 2021; Zimmerman & Chesnutt, 2022).

  • Recent targeted operations eliminated senior ISIS figures, including operatives linked to advanced capabilities, but leadership losses have not dismantled the broader network (ODNI, 2025).

  • Financial resilience persists through informal value‑transfer systems, illicit revenue streams, and criminal activities sustaining affiliate operations; financial authorities and threat assessments have emphasized the need to disrupt these mechanisms (Congressional Research Service, 2022; DHS, 2024).

  • Digital propaganda and multilingual outputs remain central to recruitment and remote-directed violence, sustaining lone-actor and small-cell risks to Western targets while affiliates emphasize local territorial consolidation (ODNI, 2025; Zimmerman & Chestnut, 2022).


Meaning of Findings

  • The principal U.S.-relevant threat from ISIS today is ideological and catalytic: decentralized affiliates and sustained online messaging create pathways for inspired violence rather than necessarily centralized external plotting.

  • ISIS’s strategic patience and networked model enable regeneration; tactical setbacks slow but do not eliminate the capacity to harm. Continued instability in Syria, Iraq, and fragile states across Africa and Asia provides sanctuary and recruitment pools (ODNI, 2025; Stanford CISAC, 2021).

  • Countering ISIS therefore requires integrated approaches beyond kinetic pressure: disrupting finance and logistics, degrading online recruitment, and strengthening local governance and community resilience are all essential (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, 2025).


Assessment and Recommendations

Final assessment: ISIS is transformed but not defeated. Its central core has been weakened, but its ideology, affiliate network, financing mechanisms, and digital reach endure. The threat to U.S. national security is persistent and multi-dimensional: inspiration of attacks, regional destabilization that harms partners, and long-term risk of affiliates rebuilding capabilities for external operations.

Priority recommendations:

  1. Sustain multi-domain pressure

  2. Disrupt finance and logistics

  3. Invest in governance and stabilization

  4. Expand digital countermeasures and strategic communications

  5. Strengthen community-based prevention and survivor programs

  6. Improve interagency and international cooperation


Closing Observation

ISIS’s arc shows adaptation rather than extinction. Durable defeat depends on integrated strategies that combine military, intelligence, economic, and societal tools. Addressing root conditions that make populations vulnerable to ISIS’s message (governance gaps, economic despair, and social fragmentation) will be decisive. Pairing persistent pressure with long-term investment in resilient communities and stronger digital defenses shifts the strategic advantage away from extremist actors.


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