Islamic State leaders had long promised their followers an apocalyptic battle — foretold, some believe, by the Prophet Muhammad — in an otherwise nondescript village they controlled in northern Syria.
But the warriors of the self-declared caliphate lost the village, Dabiq, in just a few hours over the weekend as Syrian rebels, backed by Turkey, closed in. To soften the symbolic blow, the Islamic State switched rhetorical gears, declaring that the real Dabiq battle would come some other time.
On the defensive
The about-face was part of a larger repositioning as the IS loses ground, not only in Syria but also in Iraq. On the defensive in both countries, the group has been making preparations for retrenchment and survival. Hundreds of IS fighters and their families have fled to the group’s de facto capital, the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, in recent days, according to several residents of that city. They said that the arrivals had come from Mosul, as well as from areas around Dabiq in Aleppo.
The group has also been laying the ideological groundwork to maintain its appeal in straitened circumstances. As it suffered on the battlefield in recent months, the group began signalling that a drastic contraction or even a failure of its territorial proto-state would not spell defeat.
“The generation that has lived in the shadow of the caliphate, or has lived during its great battles, will be able — God willing — to keep its banner aloft,” the group’s weekly Arabic-language newsletter, Al Naba, said in June.
The article reminded followers that the group’s predecessor, the Islamic State in Iraq, had survived by fading into the desert after military defeat during the U.S. occupation, only to re-emerge more formidably in Syria years later and eventually seize much of Iraq, including Mosul.
Dabiq has been central to the group’s identity. The Islamic State’s online magazine is called Dabiq, and its news agency, Amaq, is named after the surrounding area. And many Islamic State opponents seized on the village’s fall and the recalibration of the group’s messaging as proof that its grand visions were falling apart.
