Tigris River and bridge in Mosul. US Army Photo/Michael Bracken. Public Domain.The Syrian city of Raqqa is regarded as the operational headquarters of ISIS. But Mosul, the second city of Iraq, is far more populous. And ISIS's rapid expansion from 2013 culminated there, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the existence of an Islamic caliphate in Mosul's chief mosque on 4 July 2014.
ISIS propaganda greeted this event as the distinguishing feature of its whole movement. The announcement, the violence of the movement's expansion across northern Iraq that preceded it, and the strong western response, together led to the western air-war that started the following month (see "ISIS against, and in, the west", 22 September 2016).
More than two years later, the sheer intensity of that war is rarely discussed in western media. Airwars reports that there have been over 15,000 airstrikes, about two-thirds in Iraq and the rest in Syria, with 54,600 bombs and missiles dropped. Airwars puts the minimum estimate of civilian loss of life at 1,612, while the Pentagon estimated in in March 2016 that 30,000 ISIS supporters, paramilitaries and others had been killed.
