"In this episode of 'The Hunt with WTOP national security correspondent J.J. Green,' Dr. Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director of the Counter Extremism Project, said it’s not enough to say he’s dead. You need to present evidence."

"In Syria, the terror group 'has generally increased or maintained a higher tempo of attacks' since an initial jump in activity last August, according to an assessment earlier this month by the Counter Extremism Project, a New York and Berlin-based non-profit.

'There are increasingly many similarities between attacks over the past months and the period of initial ISIS expansion in late 2019 and early 2020,' the CEP report added, though it cautioned the terror group appears to be increasingly focused on attacking civilians as opposed to security forces."

CEP Research Analyst Gregory Waters writes: "While recent massacres of civilians in central Syria have refocused some international attention on the desert region, known as the Badia, the renewed widespread battles between militants and regime security forces that have occurred in parallel to these attacks have gone unnoticed. The most significant of these was the recent battle for the village of al-Kawm between ISIS cells and Syrian military units led by the Russian private military company Wagner Group. The fighting has, as of the time of this writing, ended in a stalemate, with ISIS militants retaining control of the mountains overlooking the village."