The Iraqi government has declared victory in retaking Mosul from ISIS. While mopping up operations will continue, Iraqi forces now effectively control Mosul, the second-most populous city in Iraq. This represents a substantial blow against ISIS. It was the group’s seizure of Mosul in 2014 that marked its emergence as a major threat to the territorial integrity of Iraq. Last month, facing defeat, ISIS blew up the 800-year-old Great Mosque of al-Nuri where ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi declared a worldwide caliphate three years ago. (Baghdadi’s current whereabouts are unknown. There have been unconfirmed reports of his death, including a recent one.) ISIS’s defeat is also a clear victory for allies of the Iraqi government, notably the United States and Iran, which supported the effort to retake Mosul.
The fight against ISIS in Iraq is far from over. Other areas of Iraq remain under the group’s control. And, despite its territorial losses, ISIS remains capable of launching deadly terrorist attacks in Iraq and elsewhere. The organization represents a composite threat: it has both established a pseudo-state in parts of Iraq and Syria and developed a terrorist network capable of directing or inspiring attacks throughout swaths of the Muslim world and in the West. ISIS’s pseudo-state is crumbling; it has lost perhaps two-thirds of the territory it possessed at the peak of its geographic reach. But the organization remains a terrorist force to be reckoned with. And, even after conventional defeat, ISIS may — like al-Qaida before it — go underground and metastasize into other virulent forms.
While ISIS may have enjoyed little popular enthusiasm in Iraq, it clearly tapped into long-standing Sunni grievances against the Shia-dominated central government in Baghdad. Thus, the task of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi is two-fold: to further reduce and eventually eradicate areas under ISIS control and to woo disaffected Sunnis. Al-Abadi may be far less sectarian in his approach than his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki, but he still faces a daunting political task in attempting to unify a country fractured along sectarian and ethnic lines.
Across Iraq’s western border, ISIS is also confronting a major defeat in Syria. U.S.-backed, largely Kurdish forces are closing in on the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa. If the situation on the ground in Iraq is complex, in Syria it is bewildering. The Trump administration’s decision to arm Syrian Kurds has raised the hackles of the Turkish government, which fears that U.S.-supplied arms may end up with Kurdish separatists in Turkey. Syrian groups opposed to the Assad government and their supporters abroad are wary of possible U.S.-Russian cooperation in Syria, seeing it as working to the advantage of Assad and his patrons in Iran. One thing is certain: the defeat of ISIS on the ground will not end the Syrian civil war.
President Trump’s policies toward ISIS by and large echo those of his predecessor, Barack Obama, who in 2014 declared it U.S. policy to “degrade, and ultimately destroy” ISIS. In Syria, Trump has been more willing than Obama to strike non-ISIS targets, notably the Syrian military and Iran-backed militias. His administration has sent mixed signals about Assad’s future. But it appears that U.S. policy toward Syria is based on tacit acquiescence to Assad’s short- to medium-term survival. This is not much different from Obama’s policy, which, despite his early call for Assad to go, showed little inclination to take direct action to topple the regime in Damascus. U.S.-Russian cooperation in Syria has blown hot and cold since Trump assumed office. It remains to be seen if the latest ceasefire agreement for southwest Syria will endure. The track-record for such agreements — notably a deal cut last year between then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov — is not encouraging.
In short, the fall of Mosul and the ongoing demise of the ISIS pseudo-state are good news. But they do not herald either an end to the jihadist terrorist threat nor promise an enduring solution to the ongoing conflicts that have afflicted Iraq and, especially, Syria. It may be time to break out the champagne — or, since this is the Middle East, apple juice — but the toasts should be short.
Joe Barnes is the Bonner Means Baker Fellow at the institute. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. State Department, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.