in a US raid in north-west Syria was celebrated in a self-glorifying speech by Donald Trump as proof that Isis had been definitively destroyed. The claim had some substance: al-Baghdadi, who five years earlier had declared himself caliph in the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, was the most important surviving symbol of Isis as a territorial state. The possession of an actual state—at its height it stretched across Syria and Iraq, from west of the Euphrates to east of the Tigris—distinguished Isis from other militarised Islamic cults, like Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. For a brief, astonishing period, this reborn caliphate governed, in brutal but well-organised fashion, a population of ten million, claiming divine inspiration in its pursuit of true Islamic principles. Its rise was spectacular, but so was its fall: it lost its final piece of territory, a village in the desert on the Syrian side of the border, six months before al-Baghdadi’s death. He was reduced to moving from hideout to hideout in Idlib province, near the Turkish border, far from the Isis heartlands, with little control over Isis strategy or tactics—though it was always unclear whether he actually exercised full command.
The process of Isis decision-making over the last ten years—and al-Baghdadi’s role in it—is a mystery. If he was in total control of operations between 2011 and 2014, he can take credit for rebuilding Isis: he took advantage of the opportunities offered by the disintegration of Syria, and of Sunni resistance to a sectarian Shia government in Iraq. But after Isis captured Mosul in June 2014, almost every decision taken or endorsed by al-Baghdadi was disastrous. The caliphate in any case posed too much of a threat to other powers to last for long, but al-Baghdadi accelerated its demise by effectively declaring war against the entire world. Not everyone thought it in their interests to fight the new theocratic quasi-state: Kurds in both Syria and Iraq at first stayed neutral, opportunistically expanding their own territories as Isis battled the central governments in Baghdad and Damascus. But at the peak of Isis success, its fighters attacked the Kurds in both countries without provocation, making enemies of them—and, fatally, guaranteeing US involvement on the Kurdish side. In al-Baghdadi’s vision, to be outside Isis was to be an infidel by definition. Inevitably, the list of his opponents was all-encompassing: both the Americans and the Russians; both the Syrian government and the non-Isis armed opposition to that government. Countries which had once tolerated Isis—Turkey allowed 40,000 Isis fighters to cross the border into Isis territory—found that such covert co-operation was no guarantee that they themselves wouldn’t become a target.
Isis systematically publicised its atrocities on the internet in order to terrorise its opponents, a tactic which at first worked well but ended up mobilising those it threatened—such as the Shia in Iraq, who outnumber the Sunni population three to one. Outnumbered and outgunned, Isis would inevitably be ground down and crushed, with the Sunni community as a whole in the northern tier of the Middle East between the Iranian border and the Mediterranean suffering by association in the wake of their defeat.
The terror inflicted by Isis attacks around the world is not easily forgotten: 142 killed in Yemen when two Shia mosques were bombed; 103 peace protesters killed by a suicide bomber in Ankara; 224 blown up on a Metrojet flight to St Petersburg; 131 shot or bombed in the Paris attacks of 2015; 86 run down by a truck in Nice the following year; 593 killed in an operation in the Philippines the year after that; 311 killed when attackers opened fire during Friday prayers at a mosque in Sinai; 149 killed by a suicide bomber at an election rally in Pakistan—not to mention the eight killed in the UK in 2017 after a van drove into pedestrians on London Bridge.
So the prospect that Isis may still fight on remains a live concern around the world. Americans and Europeans may not care what happens to the Kurds, or who rules in Damascus and Baghdad, but they do worry about Isis—because Isis is a threat to themselves. In the coming presidential election campaign, Trump will try to capitalise on the assassination of al-Baghdadi, as Hillary Clinton tried to capitalise on the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, however little she had to do with it. It’s a dangerous strategy: it takes only one spectacular attack, like the co-ordinated series of suicide bombings at churches and hotels in Sri Lanka in April this year, for Isis yet again to contradict claims of its demise. Its defeats on the battlefield—especially the loss of Mosul and Raqqa after the sieges of 2017—have destroyed it as a territorial entity. But al-Baghdadi’s death makes its resurrection in new forms no less likely—perhaps more. Al-Qaeda franchises had greater success after the killing of bin Laden than they did during the years of his holdout in Abbottabad. Al-Baghdadi was a symbol of Isis in victory, but also of Isis in defeat. If it is to be revived, it will have to be with new methods and modified ideology: no longer seeking self-isolation above all, no longer punishing anyone not wholeheartedly in its own camp. Al-Baghdadi’s removal may make such a transformation easier to carry out.
That said, the obstacles are formidable. Until its apotheosis in 2014, opponents of Isis were willfully blind to its growing power, or thought they could turn it to their own advantage. They did not find it ominous that Isis had seized Fallujah, thirty miles west of Baghdad, and that the Iraqi army could not get them out. Earlier that month, Barak Obama had told David Remnick of the New Yorker that, compared to al-Qaeda, Isis was a junior varsity basketball team playing out of its league; a few months later, its fighters emerged from the desert to defeat six Iraqi army divisions and capture Mosul.
Wary of making the same mistake again, the US and its allies have remained on the alert for any sign that Isis may be back in business. But it is easy also to overestimate the threat it poses. If it is to do more than launch sporadic guerrilla attacks in isolated rural areas and stage periodic massacres of civilians abroad—if it is to re-emerge as a serious force in the region—Isis would have to persuade shattered Sunni communities and tribes in its former centres of power in Syria and Iraq that armed resistance is once again both feasible and necessary. Over the last decade, millions of them have had to flee their homes as cities from Aleppo and Homs to Mosul and Ramadi have been pounded into rubble by air strikes and artillery fire. US Central Command reports that between 2014 and 2019, it carried out a total of 34,573 air strikes on targets in Syria and Iraq, almost all of them in Sunni areas. Ferocious resistance by Isis fighters in Mosul and Raqqa resulted in unthinkable numbers of civilian dead. During the last months of the siege, I spoke to many people trapped in the Old City of Mosul. By the time the siege was over, everyone I had been in contact with was dead: killed by coalition air strikes if they stayed in their houses, or by Isis snipers if they tried to escape.
Until recently, then, the chances of an Isis revival looked slim. Friends and enemies had both suffered the murderous violence of its rule and had no wish to repeat the experience. An organisation as ruthless as Isis isn’t going to seek popular approval before it acts, but it can’t rely wholly on intimidation to gather recruits for a new campaign: it needs to retain some sympathy among the Sunni community at large. More important, it has always thrived on chaos: with its rivals at one another’s throats, it could exploit the vacuum of political and military power. For much of this year, chaos seemed to be on the way out, as normal life gradually returned to former battle zones in both Syria and Iraq—unpropitious conditions for Isis. But in October, the situation changed.
I was in Baghdad on the evening of 1 October, staying at the Baghdad Hotel near Tahrir Square in the city centre. I was planning to visit Diyala Governorate, north of Baghdad, the following day. The area had once been an Isis stronghold, and I wanted to see whether it was making a comeback. From my hotel, I heard the distant sound of shots. They could have been in celebration of a wedding, or victory in a football match, but the gunfire went on too long for those things to make sense, so I went down to the lobby to find out what was happening. As I reached the front door, a man came in from the street to say that the security services were shooting at protesters; ten of them had been killed. Later in the evening, I got in touch with a doctor at Medical City, a hospital complex not far from Tahrir Square, who said that ten dead was an underestimate and that he himself had seen four bodies. Meanwhile, the government was claiming a death toll of one.
Nobody had been expecting violence. By Baghdad standards, it was a small protest—some 3,000 people on the streets—and it was motivated by social and economic issues: unemployment, government corruption, and inadequate electricity and water supply. I had been told about it the previous day by a group of young men demonstrating opposite the foreign ministry, where they were demanding jobs appropriate to their status as university graduates. They said they had