Journalist and terrorism expert Graeme Wood spoke to Yahoo News about how the Islamic State’s losses on the battlefield have affected their mission.

The tragedy in Brussels on Tuesday intensified the ongoing debate over whether President Obama’s counterterrorism strategies to defeat ISIS have been working.

During a news conference in Argentina on Wednesday, Obama addressed the importance of defeating ISIS.

“I understand why this is the top priority of the American people. And I want them to understand this is my top priority as well,” Obama said. “But we are approaching this in a way that has a chance of working, and it will work. And we’re not going to do things that are counterproductive simply because it’s political season. We’re going to be steady. We’re going to be resolute, and ultimately we’re going to be successful.”

Graeme Wood, a contributing editor at the Atlantic and the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is an expert on ISIS whose article “What ISIS Really Wants” from last year shed light on the terrorist group’s beliefs as an agent of the apocalypse.

He spoke to Yahoo News on Wednesday about what’s changed for ISIS over the past year and what this means for U.S. efforts to stop the group’s reign of chaos and violence.

The U.S. campaign against ISIS so far

Wood says that the campaign against ISIS is going far better than could have reasonably been expected a year ago. It’s remarkable, he said, that this has been the case without the heavy hand of U.S. involvement.

“If you looked at ISIS’ plans for expansion and conquest, you would have seen a list of places that were very much up for grabs and battles that they were expected to win,” Wood said in an interview with Yahoo News. “Most of that list of battles are a list of ISIS defeats over the last year. They had some very serious setbacks tactically.”

It’s important for Americans to understand that merely degrading or destroying ISIS would not mean defeating the group, he said. As a mass movement, they are going to have foreigners in many different locations willing to support them in a violent manner, regardless of whether they are losing battles in Syria.

A major concern prevented ground warfare

The U.S. and its allies cannot simply defeat ISIS on the battlefield, according to Wood, echoing what the White House has insisted. A plan is needed for what comes next, which is primarily why Obama has not deployed boots on the ground, as the more bellicose Republican presidential candidates want.

Wood says the U.S. and its limited coalition of allies can gain control of terrorist strongholds like Raqqa or Mosul if officials are willing to sacrifice more American lives, because there is no question that the U.S. is more militarily capable than ISIS.

According to Wood, several things will happen if this course of action is taken: 1) ISIS will be driven underground and turned into a beleaguered guerilla organization; 2) the U.S. would inherit a volatile, politically untenable situation; and 3) residents would demand some sort of rule of law that they deem credible.

“The United States can’t do that. We’re not very good at it. The 2000s in Iraq showed us how bad at it we are,” Wood said. “We can’t expect that we’re going to be better than we were in 2011. … The only way to win it is to make sure there’s someone who can step in in our place and act as a government that the people there accept. That government entity does not exist.”

A damaged building located just west of Benghazi, Libya. (Photo: Mohammed el-Shaiky/AP)

Why ISIS is targeting Europe

With more losses on the battlefield, ISIS could very well be lashing out at Europe even more than usual to signal strength and success to its adherents. The Islamic State group does not hide the fact that terrorist attacks against the West are presented as morale boosters.

“They want to show they are still the premiere terrorist organization. And one way to do that is to dominate a news cycle,” Wood said. “They even speak about attacks [on the West] in terms of morale. They talking about ‘warming the hearts of believers.’”

It’s important not to overstate this motivation, however, because the desire among jihadists to inflict violence on the West clearly far predates their recent defeats. But the group needs to achieve some “victories” in order to appear as a juggernaut.

Major changes to ISIS since last year

Wood says that the group's lost territory since this time last year — Kobani, Ramadi, Sinjar and likely more soon — has radically changed the way they can portray themselves.

“Formerly, they could say, ‘We’re unstoppable. We’re incredible.’ I’ve even had supporters of ISIS say to me, ‘Look, they have the favor of God himself. How else could they keep at bay the entire world that’s opposed to them?’” he said.

As for what they believe and what there goals are, that has not changed much. Wood said that ISIS members still talk incessantly about the importance of the caliphate, implementing their interpretation of Islamic law and helping to bring about the apocalypse.

He concluded: “Ideologically, the same. Practically, some fairly big differences.”

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Health officials are still working on 4,293 suspicious cases, the Health Ministry said.

Scientists in Brazil say the increase in microcephaly—in which a baby is born with an abnormally small head and often incomplete brain development—is linked to an explosion of the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus, with an estimated 1.5 million people infected.

The World Health Organization is studying the possible connection and calls the Zika outbreak an international health emergency.

Brazil typically reports 150 cases of microcephaly per year.

The birth defect is also associated with mothers who contract syphilis, rubella or toxoplasmosis during pregnancy.

About a dozen years ago, I stepped into a Brussels taxi and gave the driver a note with an address on it. He took it silently, set the meter and drove off through the city’s bustling, high-end hotel district. The gleaming steel and glass storefronts for Gucci, Tiffany and Dior soon gave way to grittier streets.

I was on a mission to find and photograph a house where a friend’s father, a B-17 pilot, had been hidden by the anti-Nazi underground during World War II. A riveting book about his daring escape from Brussels through France, The Freedom Line, suggested that the neighborhood where he was hidden was populated back then by middle-class burghers living in neat rows of pastel-colored brick townhouses.

“Why are you going there?” my driver asked, his North African, Arab features—dark eyes and wiry black hair—framed by the rear view mirror.

I told him my story.

“It’s very different now,” I recall him saying. “It’s all Arab.” And then, unprompted, he delivered a bitter lecture on the history of Arabs in Belgium, how they were imported from North Africa in the 1950s and 1960s as cheap labor to work in the factories. Most of those businesses had moved on, he said, leaving the immigrants unemployed with no real future for decades. In January, youth unemployment sat at nearly 23 percent, according to official estimates. “Although there are no statistics for Muslim employment levels,” the Euro-Islam websitesays, citing the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “the foreign-born have unemployment rates more than twice that of indigenous Belgians.”

The street I was looking for in 2004 abuts the Schaerbeek neighborhood, where on Tuesday Belgian police were desperately searching for perpetrators of the spectacular attacks hours earlier on the Brussels airport and a metro station. The Islamic State group, known as ISIS, claimed responsibility for the attacks, which killed at least 31 people and wounded more than 80. The group has called for Muslims in the West to rise up and carry out attacks on their own.

Authorities have said their hunt for extremists since last November’s attacks in Paris have been hindered by a passive acquiescence on the part of Muslim immigrants to the presence of anti-Western militants in their midst.

(On Tuesday, an umbrella group of Belgian Muslims condemned the attacks, saying they “complicate the efforts of society...and the entire Muslim community in favor of a harmonious coexistence.” Previously, the group had been “criticized...for not condemning the violence of the group that calls itself the Islamic State," according to the Religion News Service.)

Matthew Henman, the managing editor of IHS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Center, says ISIS laid out its strategy to exploit European Arabs’ alienation last year in its online magazine, Dabiq. Its idea, Henman tells Newsweek, is “to divide the world into those who are with the group and those who are against it.” ISIS, he added, “aims to make elements within this marginalized population more susceptible to their narrative and then to radicalization and recruitment.”

Belgium’s recruiting pool is deep. Its Muslim population sits at 640,000, according to Belgian Arabist and author Pieter van Ostaeyen. And over 500 “were active in Syria or Iraq,” he wrote on his blog last October.

“This number means that out of Belgium’s Muslim population of about 640,000 individuals, there is roughly one per 1,260 who has been involved in jihad in Syria and Iraq,” Ostaeyen added. “At this point, Belgium is, per capita, by far the European nation contributing the most to the foreign element in the Syrian war.”

With factories closing amid cyclical recessions beginning in the 1960s, Belgium tightened its immigration controls, which peaked with a 1974 formal cap to limit economic migration, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. But starting with wars and unrest in North Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans in the 1990s, the pace of political asylum seekers showing up in Belgium quickened. By 2010, Moroccans and Turks alone made up three-quarters of Belgium’s immigrant population. The country’s citizenship and cultural integration policies, meanwhile, were virtually nonexistent, the institute says, “shaped in a laissez-faire way for decades.” The immigrants were basically on their own, albeit subsidized by government benefits.

And it showed. In 2004, as my taxi inched along a narrow street lined with paint-peeling houses and kebab shops, young and old Arab men on the sidewalks, as well as women in black hijabs towing children, looked like they were looking for something better to do. This was only a few miles from the fashionable, orderly downtown and the stately headquarters buildings of the European Union, but a world away. Just coincidentally, I’d come to Brussels to attend a conference on terrorism. The subject then was Al-Qaeda, which seemed far away and on the run, despite its airliner attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.

When we stopped abreast the house at number 160 Rue Marie-Christine in northwest Brussels, we might as well have been in Morocco, Libya or Algeria. The men in the street eyed me warily as I stepped out of the cab, took a few steps and snapped pictures of the now-battered house where my friend’s father had once been hidden from the Nazis.

“It’s not good to linger here,” my driver said. I stepped back into the cab, and we sped off. Indeed, the street seemed like one of those proverbial pools of gasoline waiting for a match. On Tuesday, one of them exploded.

TEL AVIV – The mastermind of the November 2015 Paris attacks told an acquaintance that he was the commander of 90 “kamikazes-in-waiting” who infiltrated Europe to carry out terrorist attacks, according to information contained in a 55-page report compiled by French anti-terrorism officials.

The report was leaked to the New York Times, which published the startling details on Saturday. The report is newly relevant in light of the Islamic State’s Tuesday terror attacks in Brussels that killed at least 31 people and wounded at least 270 others.

The French report included details of a meeting between the Paris mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud; his first cousin, 26-year-old Hasna Aitboulahcen; and a friend of Aitboulahcen’s.

The Times reported:

On Nov. 15, [Aitboulahcen] and a friend drove out to a remote spot along the freeway, where Mr. Abaaoud came out of the bushes and joined them, the report said, quoting the account of the friend.

According to the friend’s account to the police, Mr. Abaaoud regaled them with stories about how he had made it to Europe by inserting himself in the stream of migrants fleeing across the Mediterranean. He explained that he was among 90 terrorists who had made it back and who had gone to ground in the French countryside, the friend told the police.

“Abaaoud clearly presented himself as the commander of these 90 kamikazes-in-waiting, and that he had come directly to France in order to avoid the failures they had experienced in the past,” the police said the friend had told them.

The Times reported on the seeming ease with which the attackers in Paris were able to move between Belgium and France, and even between the Middle East and Europe. The newspaper attributed some of this to what the Times described as “the inability or unwillingness of countries to share intelligence about potential terrorists, for legal, practical, and territorial reasons.”

“We don’t share information,” Alain Chouet, a former head of French intelligence, told theTimes. “We even didn’t agree on the translations of people’s names that are in Arabic or Cyrillic, so if someone comes into Europe through Estonia or Denmark, maybe that’s not how we register them in France or Spain.”

Regarding the jihadists’ ability to cross borders with impunity, the newspaper added:

They exploited weaknesses in Europe’s border controls to slip in and out undetected, and worked with a high-quality forger in Belgium to acquire false documents.

The Times further provided details of how the suicide bombers were able to blend in, disguising explosives beneath their clothes:

At the scene of one suicide bombing, at a McDonald’s restaurant about 250 yards from the French national soccer stadium, the police bagged the bomber’s severed arm. The autopsy showed that a piece of string with a flap of adhesive tape at one end, believed to be the detonation cord, was wrapped around the limb. Along with TATP residue, they found electrical wires, a 9-volt battery to drive the detonation, and pieces of metal, including bolts, that had been mounted on the suicide belt as projectiles. Seeking to blend in with the soccer fans, another bomber had been wearing a tracksuit with the logo of the German soccer team Bayern Munich. His severed leg was found still in the tracksuit and, next to him, again, a piece of white string.

Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.

(BREIBART)