Even as it launches waves of terrorist attacks around the globe, the Islamic State is quietly preparing its followers for the eventual collapse of the caliphate it proclaimed with great fanfare two years ago.

In public messages and in recent actions in Syria, the group’s leaders are acknowledging the terrorist organization’s declining fortunes on the battlefield while bracing for the possibility that its remaining strongholds could fall.

At the same time, the group is vowing to press on with its recent campaign of violence, even if the terrorists themselves are driven underground. U.S. counterterrorism experts believe the mass-­casualty attacks in Istanbul and Baghdad in the past month were largely a response to military reversals in Iraq and Syria.

Such terrorist acts are likely to continue and even intensify, at least initially, analysts say, as the group evolves from a quasi-state with territorial holdings to a shadowy and diffuse network with branches and cells on at least three continents.

Indeed, while the loss of a physical sanctuary would constitute a major blow to the Islamic State — severely limiting, for example, its ability to raise money, train recruits or plan complex terrorist operations — the group’s highly decentralized nature ensures that it will remain dangerous for some time to come, according to current and former U.S. officials and terrorism experts.

“Where al-Qaeda was hierarchical and somewhat controlled, these guys are not. They have all the energy and unpredictability of a populist movement,” said Michael Hayden, the retired Air Force general who headed the CIA from 2006 to 2009.

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But signs of desperation are mounting weekly inside the caliphate, which shrank by another 12 percent in the first six months of 2016, according to a report last week by IHS Inc., an analysis and consulting firm.

A series of communiques issued in the Islamic State’s Syrian enclave last month closed down Internet cafes in one province and ordered the destruction of TVs and satellite dishes in another.

The orders, billed as an effort to eliminate a tool for “disseminating infidel beliefs,” effectively cut off access to news from the outside world.

More signals of a coming downfall are contained in statements issued by Islamic State officials over the past six weeks, a period that saw the group’s fighters retreating across multiple fronts, from Fallujah in central Iraq to the Syrian-Turkish border.

A remarkable editorial last month in al-Naba, the Islamic State’s weekly Arabic newsletter, offered a gloomy assessment of the caliphate’s prospects, acknowledging the possibility that all its territorial holdings could ultimately be lost. Just two years ago, jihadist leaders heralded the start of a glorious new epoch in the world’s history with the establishment of their Islamic “caliphate,” which at the time encompassed most of eastern Syria and a vast swath of northern and western Iraq, a combined territory roughly the size of Great Britain.

The editorial, titled, “The Crusaders’ Illusions in the Age of the Caliphate,” sought to rally the group’s followers by insisting that the Islamic State would continue to survive, even if all its cities fell to the advancing “crusaders” — the separate Western- and Russian-backed forces arrayed against them.

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The group’s near-defeat in 2008 also has been cited multiple times in recent weeks in social-media accounts, suggesting to some analysts that its leaders are trying to limit the inevitable damage to the Islamic State’s reputation among jihadists as an unstoppable military and moral force.

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The Islamic State operative who consented to an interview acknowledged that some of the group’s followers had become disillusioned because of mistakes by individual commanders. He said he didn’t care whether the organization’s headquarters remained in Raqqa or moved to North Africa or elsewhere — although he added that the loss of Raqqa would certainly be avenged.

“There is a message to all members of the coalition against us: We will not forget, and we will come into your countries and hit you,” he said, “one way or the other.”

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European intelligence officials fear that the new phase is already underway. “They are . . . challenged as we adapt our strategy to their initial one, in order to start ‘de-sanctuarizing’ them,” said a senior French security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss counterterrorism strategy. “But they will now expand to other tactics and start executing much more insidious and covert ops, in big cities.

“The next step,” he said, “has begun.”

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