However, the decline of the militant group has created an open-ended geopolitical dilemma, and triggered a competition for control between several stakeholders in the region. The rise of ISIS has changed the geopolitical reality in the Middle East and imposed one of the most significant territorial shift since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath World War I. Therefore, battlefield victories against ISIS are not enough, and are not sufficient to alleviate, alone, its lingering threats. A fraction of those fighters is more than enough to wage a new insurgency in the region. About 10,000 fighters are still committed despite international operations to annihilate the group (6). In early 2018, some 3,000 ISIS fighters and 7,000 loyalists of ISIS, including women and children have remained in Iraq and Syria. This transformation means there is no direct link between the battlefield losses in Syria and Iraq and its capacity to continue inspiring new recruits, conducting attacks, and cultivating divisions among the population. Some observers like Stephen Walt points out that “we should be wary of a premature “Mission Accomplished” moment and be judicious in drawing lessons from an outcome that otherwise merits celebration.” (5) In other words, ISIS switches from governing mode to insurgency mode. The organization does not have a start and end date however, its power has shifted between controlling territory and losing territory. The organization is simply going underground and it is a part of a cyclical process of this group it is not linear. But even as the group is being decisively defeated on the battlefield after losing key territories including its de-facto capital Raaqa in October 2017, the organization is far from being uprooted and it is premature to claim ISIS has been extinguished from the face of the Earth. Just by looking at the map, the losses in 2017 are significant compared to previous years (4). State Department illustrates ISIS’s territorial losses in 2017. Thus, ISIS lost around 21,400 square miles or 96% of the territory, mirroring almost 100 percent territorial lost that President Trump mentioned in his speech. At the start of 2018, ISIS is barely holding a small portion in the Jazeera desert in Iraq’s Anbar province, and a few towns along the Euphrates River banks in Syria roughly no more than 1900 square miles or 4% of its original territory (3). Once in office, Trump accelerated the pace of military operations by giving the American commanders more authority to strike and make battlefield decisions.Īs a result, ISIS territory dramatically shrunk to 9300 square miles, when Raaqa was liberated in October 2017 (2). However, when he began his presidency in January 2017, ISIS controlled around 23,300 square miles of territory across Iraq and Syria. When Trump was elected president November 8, 2016, the United States-led-coalition had already taken more than 13,000 square miles from the group. He asserted that “one year later, I'm proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated very close to 100 percent of the territory just recently held by these killers in Iraq and Syria" (1). In his first State of the Union address in January 2018, President Donald Trump declared ISIS militarily defeated, and reminded the Congress of his 2017 pledge to work with America’s allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the Earth.
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