The end of Isis

Donald Trump said last week: ‘‘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 point out that Isis is far from defunct as an organisation. It is losing the last of the territory it once held, but it carried out lots of terrorist attacks before it controlled any territory and 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 breakaway group from Osama bin Laden’s original jihadi organisation, al Qaeda, 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 mid-2015 peak, Isis controlled about half the territory of Syria and Iraq. It looked impressive, but was only possible because the Syrian government was fighting – and, at that point, losing – a civil war, while Iraq was weakened after the withdrawal of United States troops.

Later in 2015, Russia intervened on the side of the Syrian regime, which has now won its civil war, and the return of US troops to Iraq let that government recover all its territory by mid-2017. The last Syrian villages under Isis control will be recaptured this week.

Bin Laden was right: Isis’s great mistake was to create an actual state that could be successfully attacked. Various armies duly did just that, and now Islamic State is gone – while al Qaeda carries on. But it no longer uses that name in Syria, as it attracts unwelcome Western attention.

For years al Qaeda’s Syrian branch called itself al-nusra, and now it trades as Hayat Tahrir alsham (Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant), but it is still al Qaeda in all but name.

And there is one place in Syria where al Qaeda does control territory despite the late bin Laden’s views: Idlib province in the north-west, 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 Qaeda has brought all the other rebel groups there under its control. So al Qaeda in Idlib now controls a border and commands about 50,000 fighting men. It is a state for all practical purposes – 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 rebel Islamist militias against Syrian President Bashar al-assad, but all its local allies have been subjugated by al Qaeda, which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is much less enthusiastic about. Russia has never supported any Islamist forces and would happily help Assad take back Idlib tomorrow. However, Moscow hopes to detach Turkey from Nato and turn it into an ally, so probably won’t move against al Qaeda until Erdogan gives it a green light. That may take some time.

It could be a year yet before the wars that have ravaged the Middle East since the US 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.

Newport so shut down the All Blacks that day that Don Clarke didn’t get one shot at goal.