The Islamic State After the ‘Caliphate’: Still Remaining and Expanding

Four years ago this month, the Islamic State’s (ISIS) “caliphate” was finally destroyed with the fall of the village of Baghuz in eastern Syria. The restoration of the caliphate had been announced five years earlier, in June 2014, and days later the then-caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had appeared at the Nuri Mosque in Mosul to publicly lay claim to his new realm. Six months after the Battle of Baghuz, Al-Baghdadi was dead, and since then two of his successors have been killed. ISIS has controlled no cities since 2019 and in ISIS’s heartland, in Iraq and Syria, the group has…