The US has never caught a Middle Eastern “terrorist” overnight. It has always taken them months, if not years, to flush out the bad guys, but in the end, they got Saddam and they got bin Laden.

So far, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi has been winning at this massive game of cat and mouse (he has already survived a US airstrike).

Why is this?

Baghdadi and his followers have proven exceptionally difficult to track and kill because they’re encrypting their communications and taking steps to avoid being detected by U.S. surveillance. Without American intelligence operatives on the ground in ISIS’s home base of Syria—and with only a limited number of surveillance planes in the air—those communications are one of the only surefire ways to keep tabs on ISIS.

ISIS also has a program that deletes messages they send via the internet. They also allegedly use FireChat, “which allows users to send messages to each other without connecting to the Internet”.

The group is not stupid – they’re fully aware that they are being watched and monitored, and are “taking extra precautions” such as adjusting communications patterns.

But America will not stop.

ISIS members may be harder to track, but on the flip side, persistent U.S. electronic surveillance, as well as overhead monitoring by drones, has constrained the group.

A former US official has also said: “At the end of the day, an intelligence organization [conducting surveillance] forces two choices: Communicate and be at risk, or don’t communicate and fail to coordinate.”

Something from ISIS will slip… All in good time.

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