ISIS losing grip on territory, forces and wealth
Loss of power in Middle East could push members to the West, warn military experts
A DUSTY and nondescript Syrian village is where Islamic State believes its ultimate, bloody, end-of-days battle with infidel enemies will rage.
Remote Dabiq is where the Prophet Muhammed located his vision of Armageddon — a final showdown between Muslims and the West that will signal the beginning of the world’s end.
And now, with the jihadis’ Caliphate fast losing men, treasure and land, the apocalyptic prophecy seems to loom closer as opposition forces draw nearer to the symbolic site.
It is a clash the barbaric killers of the ISIS have long gloated over.
The backwater, six miles south of the Turkish border, near Aleppo, was where Jihadi John chose to be filmed looming over the severed head of US aid worker Peter Kassig after ISIS forces took the village in 2014.
The British cutthroat, real name Mohammed Emwazi, snarled at the camera: “Here we are, burying the first American Crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive.”
So important is the village in ISIS consciousness that the terrorist group even named its glossy propaganda magazine Dabiq.
These days some believe that the tiny town looks like not just a last stand for ISIS, but a last hope.
Leader . . . al-Baghdadi
In the 1,300-year-old prophecy, is is said Muhammed declared that: “The Last Hour would not come until the Romans land at al-A’maq or in Dabiq.”
“Romans” these days translates as the West or Christians — and Muhammed goes on to say that the Muslims will prevail in this final battle before the end of the world.
ISIS fanatics believe this victory is a promise from God — and they will need his help.
Military experts believe that ISIS is crumbling and on its way to an eventual defeat.
But they also think that any finish to ISIS’s war in the Middle East could mean jihadists are freed to head to the West and cause carnage in a new wave of terror attacks.
The reality is that the death cult which once swept all before it in its Syrian and Iraqi heartland has in recent months suffered a series of spectacular reverses on the battlefield and to its purse.
Since its 2014 pinnacle, led by the so-called “Invisible Sheikh” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS has lost around 40 per cent of the populated territory it controlled in Iraq.
It has also lost some 20 per cent of its Syrian lands.
Syria’s ancient jewel, Palmyra, and the key Iraqi city of Ramadi have be wrenched from ISIS’s grasp this year by government forces.
More than 25,000 IS fighters in Syria and Iraq — including Jihadi John — have been killed in just 20 months by RAF and coalition air strikes, the US military revealed in April.
The dead also include red-bearded, Soviet-born Omar al-Shishani, ISIS’s equivalent of a defence minister, who had a £3million bounty on his head.
Many of their most adept commanders, as well as a 100 mid and senior-level chiefs, have also perished.
Late last month coalition aircraft dropped leaflets on to Raqqa urging civilians to flee as US-backed forces drew within 20miles from ISIS’s de-facto capital.
An activist with the group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, posted a picture of one of the leaflets online. It read: “The time you have been waiting for has come, the time to leave Raqqa.”
This Syrian city is where ISIS shows its true depravity — publicly crucifying enemies, trading sex slaves and imposing a regime of beheadings and mass rape of girls as young as nine.
That got underway in ISIS’s 2014 heyday, when it conquered a swathe of territory across Syria and Iraq larger than Great Britain.
But recently, ISIS fighters have become so terrified of military drone attacks from their enemies that they have resorted to covering whole streets with sheets.
Pictures released by Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently show the makeshift shields stretched out across entire neighbourhoods in an attempt to buy cover for the extremists.
Meanwhile, 30 per cent of the terror franchise's lucrative oil infrastructure has been destroyed by the RAF and coalition airstrikes.
That means an end to what had been up to £3million a day ISIS had been earning from fuel from captured oil fields which it sold on Middle Eastern black markets.
Syrian forces have regained control of heritage site Palmyra
A report published this week shows that the IS economy fell by £346million in a 2015.
Oil, which once made up 38 per cent of its revenue stream, now only accounts for 25 per cent.
As a result, its fighters have had their wages slashed in half.
For an organisation that lured British and other Western recruits with a rolling series of seemingly unstoppable victories, the damaging setbacks could prove a nail in it’s coffin. As historian Michael Burleigh explained: “Like a shark, ISIS needs to keep moving to survive.”
Just this week, in a twin-pronged assault, Iraqi government-led forces, with coalition air support, have arrived at the gates of IS-held Fallujah, in Iraq.
And in neighbouring Syria, Arab and Kurdish fighters, backed by United States special forces, have launched a major assault to cut off IS from the outside world.
They are attempting to seize the “Manbij pocket”, a 50-mile stretch of terrain north of the town of Manbij which is ISIS’s last area of land next to the Turkish frontier.
Manbij — close to Dabiq of the apocalyptic prophecy — was pounded by 18 coalition airstrikes on Tuesday this week.
A US military official said the pocket was “significant in that it’s their last remaining funnel” to Europe.
It is along this windswept stretch of border that hundreds of Britons have crossed to join their holy war.
The hope is that once their route in is cut off, IS will start to choke.
But Michael Weiss, author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, told The Sun: “ISIS is down but not out.” He believes European recruits already inside the Caliphate are rising through the ranks as a weakened ISIS increasingly looks to launch atrocities in the West.
He added: “As they lose terrain they are evolving and adapting. I’m seeing a return to the classic al-Qaeda form of foreign operations — terror attacks like Paris and Brussels.
“I call it the Europeanisation of the organisation, people born in the West working in the ranks of the ISIS security services which were hitherto unavailable to them because they were portfolios controlled by Arabs born in region.”
And despite falling oil revenue, ISIS remains the richest terrorist organisation on the planet, making a whopping £1.7billion last year.
Indeed, new research by the Centre for the Analysis of Terrorism has found that ISIS has simply adjusted its business from oil to taxes.
Author Michael Weiss added: “It’s a myth that they’re making most of their money from natural resources.”
ISIS’s extortion of the unfortunate people living inside its territory in Iraq and Syria has skyrocketed.
Michael Weiss says ISIS is consolidating in Raqqa and MosulGetty Images
It squeezed £550million from its citizens in 2015, compared with £250million in 2014.
In 2015, taxes went from supplying 12 per cent of revenue a year to 33 per cent.
Taxes levied by ISIS include ten per cent income tax, up to 15 per cent business tax, fees of five per cent for cash withdrawals and up to 35 per on medical drugs.
There are also charges for leaving the Caliphate’s territory, even briefly.
Some four per cent of the ISIS budget comes from kidnapping and ransom and one per cent from selling plundered antiquities.
It all adds up to many experts thinking a final defeat for ISIS is not on the immediate horizon, in Dabiq or anywhere else.
After the Paris attacks, ISIS released a video threatening ‘coalition’ countries such as the UKReuters
The Analysis of Terrorism report noted: “ISIS’s military defeat is not imminent . . . as things stand, ISIS’s economic collapse remains some way off in the mid-term.”
And of course, the network has a resolute ability to launch terror attacks right across the globe. It has footholds in nations as far apart as Libya and Indonesia.
Michael Weiss said: “When you cut one of the heads off the Hydra, another grows.”
He says the Caliphate is consolidating its base in the large cities of Raqqa and Mosul, in Syria, to protect its tax-raising revenues while using large civilian populations as a shield.
Weiss added: “There’s a retrenchment effort in population centres which they cannot afford to lose without wiping out their geographical base, namely Raqqa and Mosul.”
Michael Weiss predicts a return to al-Qaeda style attacks, like in Paris and Brussels AP:Associated Press
One security source The Sun spoke to predicted these two strongholds will be difficult to take.
The source said: “It’s a fantasy that Mosul or Raqqa will fall by the end of this year. ISIS is still a viable brand. But the idea of IS as an expanding state is finished. The momentum is gone.”
Yet few doubt the final battle in the sparse village of Dabiq — at the dark heart of ISIS’s plans for global domination — is creeping closer.
And Dabiq is supposed to be the beginning of the end.
Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at [email protected] or call 0207 782 4368.