While ISIS has gotten the most attention, it's important to remember that it's just one of the more aggressive Al Qaeda splinter groups (which is one of the more aggressive Muslim Brotherhood splinter groups) so these are going to keep popping up unless there's a smarter, more comprehensive and harder strategy to smash them down. And variations of "smart power" aren't delivering that at all.
So here comes Al Qaeda's Emirate in Syria. It's a lot less grand than ISIS, but Al Qaeda thinks longer term than ISIS. Which, like the Brotherhood, makes it more dangerous.
Now the jihadi group’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front — having spent nearly five years slowly building deep roots in the country — is laying the groundwork for al Qaeda’s first sovereign state.
The Islamic State and al Qaeda use different tactics in Syria, but their ultimate objective there is the same: the creation of an Islamic emirate. Whereas the Islamic State has imposed unilateral control over populations and rapidly proclaimed independence, al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate has moved much more deliberately, seeking to build influence in the areas they hope to rule. This is a long-game strategy that the terrorist group began adopting in the late 2000s, first in Yemen, in 2011, and then in Mali, in 2012.
But the Nusra Front in Syria has proved the first potentially successful test case. After years of painstaking work to increase its sway in northern Syria, Nusra Front recently launched consultations within its own ranks and among some sympathetic opposition groups about proclaiming an emirate. Given the stakes involved, al Qaeda has recently transferred a number of highly influential jihadi figures from its central leadership circles into Syria. Their mission is to assuage the concerns expressed by other Syrian Islamist movements and those members of Nusra Front who, for now, oppose the idea of an independent emirate.
It's an incremental strategy. Al Qaeda has a number of tentacles in Syria. They make much less noise than ISIS. But the odds are that we might have to go on worrying about them, especially with our current strategy, decades from now. While ISIS will either live or die based on what happens in the next 1-5 years.