Donald Trump’s bizarre press conference announcing the killing of the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was par for the course: yet another example of ‘making America great again’. Having declared ISIS defeated many months ago, Trump could now sell this death as the final achievement. The reaction across the world was rather different, with relief at the death alongside a widespread conviction that ISIS was anything but finished.
Taking a longer-term perspective than that acceptable in the Trump era, this caution makes sense. After 9/11 the Taliban was defeated and al-Qaida dispersed in a ten-week war, but Afghanistan remains riven with conflict and hardship, and the Taliban control much of it. In 2003 the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq was felled in three weeks and within months George W. Bush had delivered his “Mission Accomplished” address aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln – but in hindsight this only marked the start of a bitter five-year war.
That was appeared to ease by early 2009 and Barack Obama was able to withdraw most US troops from Iraq by 2011, which also saw the death of Osama bin Laden and the ousting of Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya. Al-Qaida, though, reasserted itself in a new manifestation as ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and post-Gaddafi Libya descended into complex and deadly militia wars that affected the stability of much of northern Africa and the Sahel.
