Destroying Isil

The terrorist organisation that calls itself Islamic State (Isil) always claimed to be different from other violent jihadist groups. Where those organisations claimed to be fighting against something – whether it be Western “crusaders” or “the Zionist entity” – Isil was fighting for something. Three years ago, in July 2014, its leader Abu Bakr al-baghdadi stood in the Great Mosque of al-nuri in Mosul, northern Iraq, and declared that Isil was building a worldwide caliphate.

This soon had a heart, in Syria and Iraq, and a capital, Raqqa. It had revenues, imposed its own laws, taxation and, notoriously, its own particularly barbaric punishments. Nothing could have been more abhorrent. But for some impressionable Muslims around the world, including Britons, the physical expression of Isil’s extremist ideology was a powerful lure. They made the apparently inconceivable decision to go to live in the “caliphate”. Many were horrified by what they found, only to discover that they could not turn back. Isil’s warped credo, as expressed in Baghdadi’s caliphate, needed to be challenged and destroyed.

That is now happening. Isil’s territory has shrunk dramatically. And yesterday Russia said that it had “a high degree of certainty” that it killed Baghdadi in an air strike three weeks ago. If confirmed, there could be no more powerful expression that Isil’s self-proclaimed exceptionalism is coming to nothing. Just as there can be no more grim expression of the group’s spiritual nihilism than its treatment of the very mosque, 900 years old, in which Baghdadi made his caliphate speech. As Iraqi government forces approached this week, Isil blew it up.