Terror has not stopped breathing: the psychology behind the survival of ISIS

Six years have passed since the black flag of the so-called Islamic State disappeared from the last hill in Syria’s Baghouz. The world exhaled in relief. Yet anyone walking today through the ruins of Raqqa or the camps of Hasaka quickly realizes terror has not stopped breathing. It has only changed its form: quieter, more invisible, and psychologically deeper.

In the shadow zones of Syria and Iraq, ISIS is regrouping. There are no more large battalions or parades of the caliphate, but instead small cells, secret networks, and an ideology that survives in the human mind. While the international community has shifted its gaze to other wars, a new generation is growing up there; children who whisper their parents’ slogans before they can even read.

Terror, it becomes clear, was never merely a military project. It was—and remains—a psychological, social, and cultural phenomenon.

Emotional roots of violence 

Why do people join an organization built on cruelty and oppression, one capable of killing, torturing, and enslaving others without the faintest trace of empathy, shame, or guilt?

The answer lies not only in belief but in emotion. ISIS offers identity where none exists, community where despair reigns, and meaning where life seems worthless. The enemy - the “other”- is stripped of their humanity, reduced to an object unworthy of compassion, deserving only death, which is presented as their final deliverance.

Many young people in Syria and Iraq grow up in an endless cycle of war, poverty, and humiliation. Their world is fragmented, their future uncertain. Within this vacuum, the ideology of terror works like a drug: it promises strength, belonging, moral purity, and a simple explanation for suffering. Someone else is to blame the West, the “infidels,” the traitors.

In truth, as social-psychological research shows, ISIS functions as a substitute religion for the wounded. The religious language is merely packaging; the true product is power, order, and self-justification. The organization manipulates Islamic symbols to fill deep psychological wounds. It does not offer spirituality but rather a role, the “chosen one,” the “fighter,” the person who finally seizes control over his destiny.
 
The new face of horror 

Since the rise of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group with its own bloody history, chaos in parts of Syria has deepened. Wherever structures of order collapse, ISIS and other extremist or authoritarian movements begin to flourish again. In the provinces of Raqqa, Deir-ez-Zor, and Hasaka, attacks are increasing, targeted killings, assaults on checkpoints, roadside bombs.

But the most dangerous weapon of these organizations is not the rifle, it is their belief in themselves. In prisons across northeastern Syria, imprisoned “emirs” teach lessons on sharia and “sacred duty.” In the camps of Hol and Roj, where thousands of women and children from forty-eight countries live, a new generation of the caliphate is growing up.

These children are the new version of ISIS, perhaps even stronger than the old one. For them, the so-called Islamic State is not history; it is their entire world of meaning.

This is the world we continue to underestimate, not the military one, but the mental one. Terror has detached itself from geography. It now exists as a spirit, living in minds, in narratives, and in longing.
 
The invisible state 

ISIS has lost its territory but not its structure. What remains is a totalitarian idea that no longer needs a physical center. It survives as a social hierarchy, a mental order, a collective memory. The ideology has etched itself into the societies from which it once emerged.

In villages across Iraq and Syria, former members speak of “justice” and “duty,” downplaying the atrocities of the past. In the camps, women claim they “only came to help.” Children raise their fingers in the group’s symbolic gesture without even knowing what it means.

These scenes echo the aftermath of other totalitarian systems: the body has been defeated, but the idea lives on. It has become disembodied and that makes it so dangerous. You cannot bomb an idea.

Western blindness

After 2019, many Western nations celebrated the defeat of ISIS. Yet from a psychological point of view, that victory was an illusion. Instead of understanding the roots of extremism, the world focused only on its symptoms. Military success was not followed by strategies for reintegration, education, or psychological recovery.

Today, around 8,000 fighters from nearly 50 countries remain imprisoned in Syria. Most of their home governments refuse to repatriate them. But this refusal is not protection, it is a ticking time bomb.

The camps have become schools of radicalization. Every generation growing up there without hope carries the seed of a new movement. Those who believe the problem is far away are deceiving themselves. Terrorism behaves like a virus, it survives in any host vulnerable enough to carry it.
 
The psychology of trauma, ideology 

What makes ISIS and other extremist organizations strong is not only their organization but their ability to transform trauma into ideology. People who experience violence desperately seek meaning, and ISIS provides it through a perverse reversal of moral logic. Victims become perpetrators; perpetrators become martyrs.

Within this psychological dynamic lies the core danger: ideology heals pain with new violence. Thus, each generation inherits the wounds of the previous one and fills them again with blood.

To fight terror, therefore, one must address trauma, create perspectives, and offer meaning, not as naive optimism, but as a deliberate counter-narrative to the emptiness that feeds extremism.

The fight against terror is not a battle over territory; it is a battle for the human mind. It begins in schools, in conversations, in families. It needs psychologists, teachers, and social workers; not only soldiers. Above all, it requires empathy instead of stigma. Those who see only a monster in a radicalized person fail to recognize the human being behind it, the boy who longed for belonging, the girl who sought protection.
 
The hard but necessary truth 

This understanding is uncomfortable but essential: terrorism is not an alien phenomenon. It grows from human weakness, fear, humiliation, isolation. And precisely because it is human, it can be overcome through human means.

ISIS and other extremist organizations still exist, and if nothing changes, they will grow stronger. Terror has already transformed from an army into an idea, from a movement into a mentality. Its greatest weapon is not the bomb but the feeling of worthlessness that it turns into a sense of purpose. As long as people feel meaningless, terror will live on.

The real task of the international community is to restore dignity, through education, social justice, healing, and the rediscovery of our shared humanity.

Because wherever dignity grows, terror dies.

And perhaps that is the most powerful weapon we truly possess.

 

Dr. Jan Ilhan Kizilhan is a psychologist, author and publisher, an expert in psychotraumatology, trauma, terror and war, transcultural psychiatry, psychotherapy and migration.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.