ISIS

The Junior Varsity Breaks Out

The rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2013 and 2014 caught the world off guard. In Iraq, with just a few hundred soldiers, ISIS took on and easily defeated the Iraqi military, which the United States had trained at a cost of roughly $25 billion. While American president Barack Obama initially dismissed ISIS as the junior varsity of terror networks, ISIS defied these low expectations, seizing Mosul: an Iraqi city of nearly two million people. ISIS’s stunning success served as a wake-up call to the West and the Middle East, which quickly learned to take the group seriously.

By 2016, however, ISIS – or at least ISIS’s model of a bloodthirsty caliphate – seemed on the decline. The physical caliphate was being steadily dismantled in Iraq, Syria and Libya. The movement was losing turf in Iraq, Syria and Libya, and in May 2016, a US airstrike killed ISIS leader Abu Mohammad al-Adnani. US efforts also hobbled ISIS’s financial networks, and the jihadi movement lost thousands of fighters in battle. Meanwhile, the flow of foreign fighters into ISIS’...