After the caliphate

Asignificant chapter in the struggle against violent Islamist radicalism is ending: U.S.-backed forces are closing in on the last swath of ISIS-controlled territory in Syria. If and when that battle is won, it will be a moment to applaud American troops, and to praise President Trump, as commander in chief, for helping oversee the strategy needed to crush the brutal fighters and expel them from 34,000 square miles of territory in Iraq and Syria they had called a God-given caliphate.

But danger looms: Just as ISIS is the even-more-virulent successor of Al Qaeda, the beast that is the Islamic State has already morphed into a new incarnation; ISIS controls significant chunks of territory in West Africa and Afghanistan, as well as in parts of Somalia, Libya and elsewhere.

And even in Syria and Iraq, while it may no longer constitute a proto-state, levying taxes and doling out services, the U.S. military estimates that “tens of thousands” of fighters remain, melded into the general population, where they in many ways become harder targets.

The strategy is to wreak havoc whenever possible and inspire homegrown extremists in Western countries to take up arms against their fellow citizens. ISIS is, as Assistant Secretary of Defense Owen West put it in congressional testimony, “a global ideological network as deadly and evil as Al Qaeda at its height.”

The long war grows longer.