The Islamic State Was a Sham

Daniel R. DePetris

Security, Middle East

The Islamic State may be beaten back, but it is not gone, and it's lurking in the corner ready to capitalize on mistakes.

As a conventional army, the Islamic State is a spent force. The group that once lorded over eight million people across a section of Iraq and Syria about the side of the United Kingdom is now a collection of exhausted, dirty, smelly, and tired jihadists encased in a square mile of dusty tents and wailing children. Some are repentant, vowing to fight the approaching Kurdish and Arab forces until their last breath. Others are surrendering, choosing to live under the custody of their enemies rather than sacrifice themselves for a losing cause.

The territorial caliphate that Islamic State emir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared from the Grand Mosque in Mosul over four years ago is dead and buried. A few hundred stragglers remain in the village of Baghouz, ready to be killed or captured. The Islamic utopia Baghdadi effectively sold at that particular time, which brought tens of thousands of foreigners from 110 different countries into Iraq and Syria, turned out to be a ruse. Some foreigners who joined the Islamic State are now begging to come back to their countries of origin, as big an admission as any that they made a terrible mistake.

If you listened to the testimony of outgoing CENTCOM chief Gen. Joseph Votel last week, you would get a much different assessment of the Islamic State’s staying power. “What we are seeing now is not the surrender of ISIS as an organization but in fact a calculated decision to preserve the safety of their families and preservation of their capabilities,” Votel told the House Armed Services Committee on March 7. “We will need to maintain a vigilant offensive against this now widely dispersed and disaggregated organization.”