When U.S. President Donald Trump’s newly appointed special envoy to Syria, Thomas Barrack, paid his first visit to Damascus on May 29, he flew into the country on U.S. military helicopters from Jordan. He was accompanied by two State Department staff members but was most closely flanked by the U.S. military’s counter-Islamic State coalition leaders—Maj. Gen. Kevin Leahy and Brig. Gen. Michael Brooks.
Those optics were telling. While Barrack has justifiably trumpeted the extraordinary diplomatic and economic openings provided to Syria by the Trump administration in recent weeks, the Islamic State challenge arguably remains the dominant factor still guiding U.S. policy planning around Syria and the United States’ role in its future.
With more than half a century of Assad family rule now a thing of the past, the advent of a new Syria presents a genuinely historic opportunity to foster a more peaceful, stable, and integrated Middle East region. But this optimistic vision of Syria’s integration and prosperity poses an existential challenge to a malign actor such as the Islamic State, which thrives in chaos and whose agenda is to fuel division and conflict through terror. That explains why, in recent weeks, the Islamic State has been determined to challenge and undermine Syria’s newfound cause for hope.
Initially, the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 triggered a near complete Islamic State collapse, with the group going from a yearlong resurgence in 2024 in which it conducted an average of 59 attacks per month to being responsible for just two attacks in January 2025.
This sudden decline was primarily the result of the group losing its longtime safe-haven in Syria’s central desert, where Assad regime forces had proved to be unwilling and unable to challenge its desert-based insurgency. Within hours of Assad’s fall, U.S. aircraft took to Syria’s skies and hit at least 75 Islamic State facilities in that central desert region, crippling the group’s network of safe houses, training camps, and weapons stores. The group almost certainly also suffered a temporary crisis of disorientation, as it had been the Assad regime’s notorious brutality, corruption, and incompetence that had been the Islamic State’s most significant driver of recruitment and justification for attacks.
In the months since, the Islamic State has gradually regained its feet, conducting nine attacks in in February, 19 in March, 28 in April, and 38 in May. Of the 96 attacks that the group has conducted so far this year, 90 of them (or 94 percent) have been in northeastern Syria, a region outside of transitional government control and in the hands of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
On June 1, an unusually deadly attack killed three SDF fighters when Islamic State militants remotely detonated a large improvised explosive device (IED) to strike their vehicle on the main highway linking the cities of Raqqa and Hasakeh in northeast Syria. Those killed had been providing security to a convoy of oil tankers—an especially sensitive source of revenue for the SDF.
The Islamic State’s overwhelming focus on conducting attacks in SDF-controlled areas speaks volumes about where it perceives that its best opportunities lie: in territories ruled by a Kurdish-dominated movement whose secular, libertarian, socialist agenda and pursuit of autonomy has become profoundly unpopular among Syria’s Sunni Arab majority since Assad’s departure.
However, measuring the number of Islamic State attacks alone does not tell the whole story. Since January, at least 12 Islamic State plots to conduct mass casualty attacks have been foiled by security forces in government-held areas of Syria—thanks in part to intelligence shared by the United States and regional partners, in at least 10 of those incidents. Those plots included a plan by four Islamic State suicide bombers to conduct a massacre at the revered Shiite Muslim shrine in Sayyida Zeinab, located south of Damascus. Another of the foiled plots would have seen at least two suicide bombers attack a church in Aleppo, and another sought to blow up a passenger bus of returning displaced people on the M5 highway linking Aleppo and Damascus.
Such Islamic State schemes are clearly aimed at crippling the fragile popular confidence in Syria’s transitional government—a well-tested tactic that previously wrought years of chaos and debilitating bloodshed next door in Iraq. At a time when disinformation is rife across Syria, with innocent rumor and malign fake news both playing a direct role in fueling sectarian tensions and conflict, mass casualty terror attacks would threaten to drag Syria away from its optimistic place and into an abyss of civil violence.
When Trump announced in mid-May that he had decided to lift sanctions off Syria and then initiated direct engagement with Syria’s transitional government and its leader, President Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s outlook instantly improved. It is not an exaggeration to describe Trump’s initiative as completely game changing. Overnight, Syria’s economic collapse and spiraling humanitarian crisis were afforded a chance to turn around, and a long line of prospective international investors were primed to leap into action.
As Syria and its friends began to look towards recovery, the Islamic State appears to have initiated a concerning pivot. Two days after Trump shook hands with Sharaa in Saudi Arabia, the Islamic State’s weekly al-Nest newsletter featured an editorial that castigated Sharaa for “flinging himself” at “Trump’s doorstep” and reasserted the group’s long-held view that Sharaa was an “apostate” and “idolator” who was “at war against jihad.”
In the two weeks since, the Islamic State has significantly intensified its attempts to directly challenge Syria’s transitional government. In 15 days, the group has been responsible for at least five deadly attacks on Syrian government security forces in Idlib, Three Zourand Suwayda. The Islamic State has also conducted its first successful car bomb attack in two years, striking a government police station in the eastern city of al-Mayadin on May 18. At least four other IED attacks (two in government-controlled areas and two in SDF areas) and three foiled IEDs (one in government areas and two in SDF areas) point to the Islamic State having reestablished effective channels of explosives supply, device manufacture, storage, and deployment that had not existed for many months.
The group’s attacks in eastern Syria have also become increasingly bold, with larger cells launching targeted assaults on fixed positions, rather than the previous standard of brief drive-by shootings.
Syria’s government has responded to this sudden intensification of the Islamic State threat. On May 17, the elite General Security Service launched an hours-long series of raids in the city of Aleppo, in which three Islamic State militants were killed and four were captured alive. Explosive suicide vests and IEDs were seized from at least three safe houses. About a week later, on May 25, General Security Service personnel raided several Islamic State compounds in Damascus’s Western Ghouta suburbs, detaining several militants and seizing a formidable cache of weaponsincluding a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile; anti-tank missiles; several explosive suicide vests and IEDs; and crates of rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles, and ammunition. Had such capabilities been deployed into urban environments, or a missile launched at an incoming civilian airliner, Syria’s hopeful future would have been dealt a serious blow.
Beyond challenging Syria’s government directly, the Islamic State also appears determined to destabilize complex and fragile dynamics in different parts of the country. The group has conducted at least two IED attacks (targeting government soldiers on patrol) in the southern Druze-majority governorate of Suwayda in 10 days, with a third IED that struck an ambulance in Suwayda as yet unattributed. These are the Islamic State’s first attacks in Suwayda since 2018, and they come amid a profoundly fragile situation internally within the region, and between Suwayda and its surrounding Sunni Arab-dominated areas.
According to two sources within Syria’s government, the Islamic State has also sought to infiltrate and activate fighters in Aleppo’s eastern countryside, where a high-stakes and extremely tense deconfliction and negotiations process continues between the government and the SDF. At least two Islamic State-linked prison breaks have also been foiled in government-held areas of rural Aleppo, and the chief of security at one such prison near Jarablus was killed in an IED attack on May 28.
Clearly, the sudden collapse in Islamic State’s attacks following Assad’s fall was more to do with the group falling back, repositioning, and calculating how to adapt to new conditions than it was the result of any major defeat. The Islamic State’s subsequent resumption of attacks against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and government forces in Idlib; its return to operations in the southern governorate of Suwayda; increased activities in rural parts of northeastern Raqqa and Hasakeh; and significant intensification of attacks in eastern Deir ez-Zour all point to a terrorist organization that now perceives an opportunity, not an existential threat. Whether for the Syrian government in Damascus, the SDF in northeast Syria, or for the U.S.-led coalition, the warning signs should now be flashing—again.
Within this emerging challenge, a new regional security alliance is coming together, uniting Syria with its neighbors, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon. A counterterrorism operations center has been established in Damascus in recent weeks, staffed for now by officers from Syria, Turkey, and Jordan—with Iraq and Lebanon planning to join soon. Military coordination in countering the Islamic State has stepped up between Damascus and the U.S. military, as has intelligence exchange between the Syrian government and both the United States and regional states.
These are the kind of strategic responses that are required, and they will undoubtedly help. But ultimately, the test on the ground comes down to the Syrian forces proactively confronting the Islamic State’s determined attempt to resurge. Damascus, the SDF, and the counter-Islamic State coalition are all committed to the fight, but for now at least, the data tells only one story: of an Islamic State that is gradually resurrecting itself and conducting more and more attacks, with greater levels of sophistication and deadliness.
Ultimately, the most potent threat to the Islamic State is posed by the prospect of Syria’s post-Assad transition succeeding—in stabilizing the country, consolidating its rule, managing an economic revival, exerting a monopoly over the use of force, and broadening in representation of Syria’s rich diversity. After all, defeating the likes of the Islamic State is as much—if not more—a battle of ideas and a fight between a narrative of peace, hope, and national unity against one of division, hatred, and violence.
The Islamic State has managed exploit fragile political transitions to its terrifying advantage before. It must not be allowed to do so again.
