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Now that Mosul, the seat of the so-called “caliphate” in Iraq, has fallen, ISIS has a problem: It is a self-avowedly Islamic State without a state. And although the group retains its hold on Raqqa in Syria, where it’s currently encircled by U.S.-backed Syrian forces, it’s likely that it will relinquish that former stronghold too by the end of the year.

It is hard to exaggerate the scale of the problem for the group. ISIS’s claim to lead the global jihadist movement rested exclusively on its territorial successes in Iraq and Syria. At the height of its powers in 2015, it commanded an area of land the size of Britain, attracting around 30,000 fighters from at least 86 countries. No other jihadist group had annexed that amount of territory before, nor recruited as many foreign citizens to its ranks, including around 5,000 from Europe.

In mid-2014, the group seemed unstoppable, rampaging across Syria and Iraq at breathtaking speed and with a violent ruthlessness that made even Al Qaeda, the group out of which it emerged and sought to eclipse, seem restrained.

Rarely a week would pass in those heady days of ISIS ascendancy without the publication of some wildly improbable story about the latest schoolgirl, doctor, grandfather or male model who had exchanged their enviable lives in the West for new ones in the caliphate.

And thanks to its mass production of high-definition atrocities, disseminated by a vast and seemingly indefatigable cadre of fanboys, ISIS was never out of the news. Some stories were just straight up bizarre and obviously just too good to be true, like the one in the Daily Mail about ISIS “using bombs containing live SCORPIONS in effort to spread panic.” Others were just straight up sensationalist, like the report aired by CNN titled “ISIS using ‘jihotties’ to recruit brides for fighters.” And not a few were just sensationally stupid, like the interview segment — again from CNN — on how ISIS was luring women with Nutella and kittens.

Today, after a highly effective push begun under President Obama and continued under President Trump, ISIS is mired in failure. Even before losing Mosul, it had lost more than 60% of its territory in Iraq and 45% of it in Syria. According to research conducted earlier this year by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, the group’s annual revenue has more than halved: from up to $1.9 billion in 2014 to a maximum of $870 million in 2016.

Emigration to the caliphate has also plummeted, from a peak of 2,000 crossing the Turkey-Syria border each month in late 2014 to as few as 50 each month at the end of last year. The U.S. government estimates that least 75% of ISIS fighters have been killed in U.S.-led airstrikes. Reports claiming the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may have been exaggerated, but his radio silence for more than eight months now doesn’t bode well for the group, much less signal strength.

Territory, as the Atlantic’s Uri Friedman observed last October, was arguably ISIS’s “greatest strength,” and now that is has lost the symbolic center of gravity of that territory in Mosul, it is looking decidedly weak.

Indeed, because its whole existential identity and global appeal was founded on its claim to have established a truly authentic Islamic State, based on the principles of Sharia law, the breakup of its state catastrophically undermines that identity and the whole basis of its political and spiritual authority. As the political scientist Mara Revkin put it in The New York Times, “The control and governance of territory is so integral to ISIS’s brand that its loss will trigger a credibility crisis from which the group may never fully recover.”

Even more catastrophically, ISIS didn’t just claim ownership over the territory it seized. It actually had the temerity to assert a God-given right to that territory, bigging itself up not just as the meanest group in town, but also the most divinely guided one.

From ISIS’s perspective, the caliphate was no accident, and it wasn’t just the product of a conflation of historical circumstances. It was God’s will, the fulfilment of prophecy.

That imperious, divine-invoking boast, brazenly made by ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani — now dead — in his June 2014 statement declaring the restoration of the caliphate proved to be a fantastic recruitment pitch. But it was also an enormous hostage to fortune, because man or fortune or God — let’s just say history — has not smiled kindly on the caliphate experiment. Indeed, history has roundly repudiated it.

This has necessitated some interesting rhetorical contortions on the part of ISIS’s leadership. According to alAdnani, in his last recorded message in May 2016, ISIS’s current setbacks are but mere trifles in a far bigger struggle that ISIS will ultimately win.

And even if territorial defeat does occur, it will not be a “true” defeat: “Whoever thinks that we fight to protect some land or some authority, or that victory is measured thereby, has strayed far from the truth ... O America, would we be defeated and you be victorious if you were to take Mosul or Sirte or Raqqa? … Certainly not! We would be defeated and you victorious only if you were able to remove the Quran from Muslims’ hearts.”

For the true believers in ISIS’s ranks, this rhetorical flourish may be just the ticket to assuage any existential doubts