It is the end of the ISIS state

Trump’s declaration misses some key points, but he’s not entirely wrong

Last Wednesday Donald Trump said: “It should be announced, probably some time next week, that we will have 100 per cent of the (ISIS) caliphate.”

Well, it is next week now, and by the weekend Trump will probably have made exactly that announcement. He will be right, too: ISIS as a major threat has been defeated for good.

Various other people, mostly in Washington, will hasten to point out that ISIS is far from defunct as an organization. It is losing the last of the territory it once held, but it carried out lots of terrorist attacks before it controlled any territory. It will continue to do so after it has lost it all again. You can’t ‘defeat’ terrorism; you can only contain it.

ISIS (Islamic state in Iraq and Syria) was a group that broke away from Osama bin Laden’s original fundamentalist jihadi organization, alQaida, and the main reason for the rupture was that some members thought the time was ripe to create an actual Islamic caliphate. Bin Laden disagreed, so they defied him and created ‘Islamic State’ anyway.

At its peak, in mid-2015, Islamic State controlled around half the territory of both Syria and Iraq and ruled over more than seven million people. It looked impressive, but it was only possible because the Syrian government was fighting (and, at that point, losing) a civil war, while Iraq was greatly weakened after the withdrawal of American troops.

Later in 2015, Russia intervened on the side of the Syrian regime, which has now won its civil war, and the return of American troops to Iraq enabled that government to recover all its territory by mid-2017. The last villages in Syria that were once part of Islamic State will be recaptured this week, whereupon Trump will bring the US troops in Syria home — and the surviving ISIS fighters will revert to simple terrorism.

Bin Laden was right: ISIS’s great mistake was to create a target, an actual state, that could be successfully attacked by an army. Various armies duly did just that, and now Islamic State is gone — while al-Qaida, the parent organization, carries on. But it no longer uses that name in Syria, as it attracts unwelcome Western attention.

For years al-Qaida’s Syrian branch called itself al-Nusra, and now it trades as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant), but it is still al-Qaida in all but name. And there is one place in Syria where al-Qaida does control territory despite the late bin Laden’s views: Idlib province in the NorthWest, hard up against the Turkish border.

The Idlib enclave came into being more or less by default, because that was where Syrian rebel groups were sent when they surrendered to Assad’s government elsewhere in Syria. As a result the province’s population has doubled to 3 million people, and over the past year al-Qaida has fought a series of small wars that brought all the other rebel groups there under its control.

So al-Qaida in Idlib now controls a border, has significant resources, and commands around 50,000 fighting

So it could be a year yet before the wars that have ravaged

the greater Middle East since ... 2003 finally die down,

but it will come

men. It is a state for all practical purposes, although for doctrinal reasons al-Qaida avoids using the term — and as a state it is an appropriate target for an army to destroy. When will that happen?

It depends on when Russia and Turkey decide to do something about it. The Turkish government used to support various rebel Islamist militias against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but all its local allies have now been subjugated by al-Qaida, which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is much less enthusiastic about.

Russia has never supported any Islamist forces and would happily help Assad to take back all of Idlib tomorrow. However, Moscow currently hopes to detach Turkey from NATO and turn it into an ally, and therefore probably won’t move against al-Qaida until Erdogan gives it a green light. That may take some time.

So it could be a year yet before the wars that have ravaged the greater Middle East since the American invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 finally die down, but it will come.

And as the flood-waters recede the political landscape will re-emerge almost unchanged, apart from a little more democracy in Iraq and quite a lot less in Turkey.