US-backed Kurdish forces pronounced the death of the Islamic State’s nearly five-year-old "caliphate" Saturday after flushing out diehard jihadists from Baghouz, their very last bastion in eastern Syria.
The victory capped a bloody six-month operation and dealt a crippling blow to one of the most brutal jihadist groups in modern history.
But the fall of the caliphate in Syria by no means suggests that the danger is over. Even as the territory under its control shrank, ISIS inspired a spate of terrorist attacks around the world.
In the Philippines, ISIS-inspired jihadists including the Abu Sayyaf and Maute group overran Marawi City in May 2017 and battled government forces for five months—the longest urban battle in the country in recent times.
In those five months, Maute group militants attacked Camp Ranao and occupied several buildings in the city, including Marawi City Hall, Mindanao State University, a hospital and the city jail. They also occupied the main street and set fire to Saint Mary's Cathedral, Ninoy Aquino School and Dansalan College, run by the United Church of Christ in the Philippines and took a priest and several churchgoers hostage.
Their objective, the military said, was to raise the ISIS flag at the Lanao del Sur provincial capitol and declare a wilyat or provincial ISIS territory in Lanao del Sur.
When the smoke cleared from the campaign to retake the city, more than 1,200 had died—978 of them jihadist fighters, 168 of them government troops, and 87 civilians.
More recently, ISIS also claimed responsibility for the deadly January 2019 bomb attack on a Catholic church in Jolo, Sulu, that killed 20 people and wounded 102 others as they were hearing Mass.
Significantly, in Syria, the last ISIS holdouts were foreigners, and among those evacuated from the stronghold were thousands of foreigners from France, Russia, Belgium and 40 other countries that are in most cases unwilling to take them back.
Speaking to the Agence France-Presse, John Spencer, a scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point, warns that while the geographic caliphate had been dismantled, ISIS is far from defeated.
ISIS, he says, is a terrorist organization.
“All they have to do is put down their weapons and try to blend in with the population and just escape," he says. "They're not gone, and they're not going to be gone."
Here at home, as long as there are extremist groups susceptible to the pernicious ISIS message of terror, we can never be truly safe.
