News Analysis: IS getting weaker, but may increase attacks on West in 2016

Islamic State (IS), the terror group that has overrun a vast swath of territory in Syria and northern Iraq, is weakened in the past year, but that could spell danger for the West as it is likely to ramp up terror attacks in 2016, U.S. experts say.

The United States has been bombing IS targets for around a year, fearing that it could use its base to plan attacks against the West just as al-Qaida did in the 1990s when they set up bases in Afghanistan and launched the Sept. 11, 2001 strikes that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington.

It appears that IS' position is weakened, but the terrorists know they need to stay relevant, and one way to do that is to project their influence outside of the Middle East by staging attacks against the West led by the United States.

Indeed, the recent IS attacks on Paris may be a foreshadowing of things to come in 2016. While a larger-than-life attack such as the Sept. 11 attacks may not occur -- there is too much worldwide security for a terror group to be able to pull off such an audacious attack, experts said -- a more likely scenario is the staging of many small arms attacks.

Those are very difficult to prevent and detect, and the recent attack in California by a couple radicalized by IS showed that just two people can inflict more than a dozen casualties and instill fear in an entire nation.

Wayne White, former deputy director of the State Department's Middle East Intelligence Office, told Xinhua that IS appears to be weakening because of a number of factors.

Those include increased U.S. and some Russian airstrikes, far more damage to its lucrative oil sector, and military challenges on the ground against various distant points along its large, difficult-to-defend perimeter.

Indeed, the sheer magnitude of the perimeter that IS must defend always has been potentially its worst vulnerability-especially when moving sizeable IS forces to threatened sectors attracts damaging airstrikes.

In late December, not only have Iraqi forces made major gains in Ramadi, but far to the West the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Alliance forces have seized the Tishrin Dam and considerable surrounding locales from IS in northwest Syria, White noted.

With all these challenges on their home turf, IS is likely to turn more outward.

White said IS leaders are motivated by several drivers in doing so: trying to intimidate their major enemies in the West and Russia into rethinking the costs of their involvement; boosting recruitment abroad by demonstrating their power and reach; and trying to raise the morale of their beleaguered faithful inside the group's battered and shrinking Syrian-Iraqi perimeter.

White added that, aside from those drivers, one other challenge the coalition against IS must bear in mind is that when the IS "state" begins to lose far larger areas of remaining real estate, IS fighters will try to escape the clutches of forces closing in.

"Because of the vastness of the borders, incomplete border patrolling in Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia especially, lots of IS personnel probably will escape the noose just as many hundreds of al-Qaida cadres managed to escape the clutches of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan back in 2001-2002," White said.

In an email to subscribers, Global intelligence company Stratfor echoed those thoughts, saying that "the Islamic State core suffers from an intensified military campaign, leading the group to focus more on terrorist attacks outside the Middle East." Enditem