What do ISIS want? Donald Trump (Azeem Ibrahim, Al Arabiya)

The political and military machine of ISIS in the Levant is creaking at the seams. In the wake of the Russian intervention in Syria, and continued actions by the United States and their NATO allies in Iraq and the eastern areas of Syria, the group has lost somewhere between 20- to 25 percent of its territory, it is losing fighters, their recruitment efforts are faltering, and, as I have argued before, they seem to be making preparations to abandon the Levant altogether and move on to Libya and/or Afghanistan.

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Azeem Ibrahim is an RAI Fellow at Mansfield College, University of Oxford and Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. He completed his PhD from the University of Cambridge and served as an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a World Fellow at Yale. Over the years he has met and advised numerous world leaders on policy development and was ranked as a Top 100 Global Thinker by the European Social Think Tank in 2010 and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He tweets @AzeemIbrahim