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It was always going to be a dangerous policy to claim that Islamic State was finished. The danger, though, did not stop a few global leaders recently from trumpeting the imminent demise in Syria and Iraq of the richest and most destructive Islamist militant organisation the world has seen.
Russian president Vladimir Putin said as much these past weeks at a Moscow conference on international security. At a recent press conference in Washington, President Donald Trump said the US was “knocking the hell” out of IS but at least admitted there was still work to be done to defeat the jihadists.
Trump’s observation about work still needing to be done is, uncharacteristically, a real understatement. That much has been obvious in Iraq recently.
As a testament to IS’s resilience, the past weeks have seen a series of high-profile attacks, including one in which at least nine federal police officers were taken hostage at a fake checkpoint and then executed by IS fighters disguised as Shi’ite militiamen. There has also been a report that as many as 200 members of the Iraqi security forces have been killed in IS attacks over the past several months.
“IS’s proto-state no longer exists. Their flag doesn’t fly over Iraqi territory,” says Fareed Yasseen, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States. “But that doesn’t mean they’ve disappeared. They are reverting to old tactics used by al-Qaeda before 2014.”
Nearly three years on from IS’s high water mark in the summer of 2015, there is no denying that the jihadist group is not the force it once was in terms of the self-proclaimed caliphate.
But the remarks by Putin and Trump are almost certainly aimed at appeasing their domestic audience rather than illustrating the stark reality of the way IS has metamorphosed and presents a new threat in both Syria and especially Iraq.
Just last week, around the time Trump was stressing the need to get out of Syria and saying “job done” against IS, the jihadists had their own message.
In a communique posted on social media after a long silence, IS fighters reaffirmed their allegiance to the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the IS emir, who has not been heard from since November.
“To infuriate and terrorise the infidels,...