A decade ago, the Islamic State terrorist group was a household name. Tens of thousands of fighters, many from countries as far afield as Australia and France, traveled to Iraq and Syria to join an organization that sought to establish the world’s first modern-day caliphate. It was a time when civil war raged in Syria, the Iraqi government was teetering from the weight of incompetence and the Barack Obama administration was deciding whether the United States needed to get militarily involved in the region yet again, less than three years after U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq.
We know how events progressed from there. A U.S.-led coalition was assembled to snuff out the Islamic State group before it captured more land. A constellation of militias on the ground, including the Syrian Kurds and Iraqi Shia militias, were mobilized to clear the Islamic State group from the cities it controlled. In 2019, after five years of airstrikes and ground combat, the Islamic State group lost Baghouz, the last Syrian town under its thumb.
But terrorism is one of those perennial problems that doesn’t go away, no matter how many ingenious solutions its opponents throw at it. It’s also a problem that must be taken in perspective; the simple fact of the matter is that terrorist groups don’t need control of territory to inspire attacks halfway around the world.
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