ISIS fighters surrender in west Mosul. Carol Guzy/PA Images. All rights reserved.President Trump has declared that ISIS has been defeated and victory is at hand. Haider al-Abadi's government in Baghdad has even held a victory parade. Such hubris may be questioned by referring to recent history. Similar claims were made when the Taliban were deposed and al-Qaida dispersed in late 2001; after the Saddam regime fell in three weeks in 2003; when Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011; and when Barack Obama withdrew most American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan in 2011-16.
Yet conflict has extended and even escalated. It includes a rash of attacks in western Europe and the United States; an upsurge in Islamist-inspired violence in Mali, Egypt, Somalia and the Philippines; and the reinforcement of United States troops across the Sahel, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. So where is the "war on terror" now going? In search of an answer, two deeper influences on the paramilitaries' strategy need to be discerned.
The first is linked to the impact of western military campaigns. The Pentagon reports that three years of intense air and drone operations since August 2014 have killed over 60,000 adherents of ISIS. Many western citizens, who see these people as terrorists who deserve no better, will applaud this result. At the same time, those numbers mean that many more family members and friends are affected. The deaths are also widely reported in social media, with coverage that attributes to these martyrs a heroic role as true upholders of Islam against its Crusader-Zionist foes.
