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Large parts of Syria were once overrun by the terrorist group Islamic State. The country’s new government has just committed to a global effort to fight the group.
Carlotta Gall has made multiple trips to Syria in the last year, investigating terrorist attacks and sectarian killings.
Nov. 12, 2025Updated 6:47 a.m. ET
Syria was once a stronghold for the Islamic State. Now, its government has pledged to cooperate with international efforts to fight the group.
President Ahmed al-Shara of Syria visited the White House for the first time on Monday and met President Trump. On Tuesday, Syria’s minister of information, Hamza al-Mustafa, said Mr. al-Shara had recently signed a declaration of political cooperation with the U.S.-led coalition that combats the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
Mr. al-Shara was once imprisoned by U.S. forces in Iraq, and then went on to found the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda. He had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head until December of last year, shortly after he led a rebel offensive that ousted Syria’s longtime dictator, Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian leader has been discreetly cooperating with the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS and Al Qaeda since he took control of a slice of rebel-held territory in northwestern Syria in 2016, according to Syrian officials and Western diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic protocol.
Since December, Syrian security forces have been cooperating with the global anti-ISIS coalition, according to Mouaz Moustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a humanitarian and advocacy group in the United States.
Here is what to know about the Islamic State in Syria.
ISIS once ruled parts of Syria.
ISIS began as an offshoot of Al Qaeda, the group behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. It emerged out of the war in Iraq and spread into neighboring Syria in 2013 during a civil war there.
Led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of Iraq, ISIS became known for its ruthlessness and extreme ideology.
It overran parts of both Syria and Iraq in 2013 and al-Baghdadi declared a “caliphate,” or Islamic empire, urging foreign fighters to join him.
Within a year, ISIS was raising its black flag over the Syrian city of Raqqa, proclaiming it the capital of the caliphate in early 2014.
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That completed the group’s transformation from a fringe regional player to a fearsome global threat. Its fighters beheaded Syrian and foreign citizens and orchestrated mass-casualty attacks around the world.
At its height, ISIS controlled a rogue state the size of Britain.
It is diminished, but not gone.
In Syria, the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS worked with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces starting in 2014 to regain territory, retaking Raqqa in October 2017.
The Islamic State was defeated in a final battle in March 2019 at the town of Baghuz in eastern Syria, close to the border with Iraq. Thousands of fighters, and tens of thousands of family members and followers, were captured and detained.
After that, cells of Islamic State remnants remained at large in the remote desert of eastern Syria. They continued to carry out small-scale attacks on government soldiers and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
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Some, including the group’s leader, sought refuge in the rebel-held area of northwestern Syria, hiding amid vast tented camps of displaced people or finding shelter with jihadist sympathizers.
Al-Baghdadi was killed when he detonated a suicide vest during an American raid in northwestern Syria in October 2019, during President Trump’s first term.
The raid was one of several that American forces carried out against high-level extremist targets in an area that was controlled at the time by Mr. al-Shara’s Islamist rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
By that time, Mr. al-Shara had broken with Al Qaeda and he pushed ISIS out of the territory he controlled.
Government join fight against ISIS.
U.S. forces have carried on with attacks on ISIS operatives since Mr. al-Shara seized power almost a year ago.
ISIS operatives began to move from their desert hide-outs into the populous areas of central and western Syria after the overthrow of the Assad regime, according to counterterrorism analysts.
The U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS has supplied intelligence and military cooperation to help the Syrian government detain members of ISIS cells and thwart attacks, Mr. Moustafa said.
“We have been fighting ISIS for years and captured many cells,” said Col. Dhirar al-Shamlan, head of the government’s internal security forces in the eastern province of Deir al Zour. “We know them better than anyone”
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The ongoing danger posed by ISIS in Syria was evident in June when a suicide bomber attacked a congregation during a service at the Mar Elias Church in the capital, Damascus and killed at least 25 people.
The government blamed ISIS and announced afterward that it had detained members of the cell behind it.
A group calling itself Ansar al-Sunna claimed responsibility for the church bombing and some other sectarian killings. Counterterrorism analysts say this appears to be a new splinter group of ISIS.
When contacted by The New York Times, a spokesman for Ansar al-Sunna denied that the group had an active pledge of allegiance to ISIS but said it would likely make one if the conditions were right.
ISIS has also targeted government troops, claiming responsibility for a roadside bomb in May.
Hussam Hammoud and Saad Alnassife contributed reporting.
Carlotta Gall is a senior correspondent, covering the war in Ukraine.
