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After nine months spent retaking Iraq's second city, the last month of which featured some of the most challenging urban warfare seen since perhaps World War II, it would be easy for people to think the campaign against Islamic State was nearly at an end. But that is not the case.
In both Iraq and Syria, the group continues to hold territory and, as they have demonstrated, they are willing to trade the lives of their fighters to gain time for their other elements to prepare for the next phases of their grand, but doomed, Islamist project.
In the weeks and months to come, it is likely the remaining population centres Islamic State holds in Iraq, and those in Syria will be wrested from their grasp.
Their self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, will be killed (if he hasn't already been) and those elements that used to exert their rule over millions of people will be scattered across the Levant and North Africa, laying low or seeking to leave the area in order to continue the jihad elsewhere in the world.
Telling the terrorism story
The structural integrity of Islamic State has been punctured and the collapse of the terrorist organisation is at last in view. But we should not be lulled into a false sense of security that the threat is removed once the structure falls.
The ability of groups such as Islamic State, Al Qaeda and their affiliates or predecessors to survive and prosper is dependent to a large degree on their ability to sustain their ideological narrative. And that narrative in turn treats the world in binary terms, where the oppressed need to return to their Islamic roots to defeat the forces of the oppressor. And Islamic State's understanding of, and ability to exploit social media to publicise that narrative, along with their battlefield success has resulted in an unprecedented flow of recruits to its ranks from Muslims in the region as well as from diasporic Muslim populations in the West.
The battlefield victory over Islamic State will go some way to invalidating Islamic State's dream and to erase some of the embarrassment suffered by the Iraqi military's meek defeat in Mosul two years ago.
But more important in the long term to defeating the attraction of intolerant Islamist groups will be the post-conflict phase. In Iraq this will require the establishment of government services as quickly as possible following on from the success of the Iraqi military in order to establish confidence in Iraqi civil society and in the government's ability to lead it.
Above all however, it will require a commitment on the part of the Iraqi Government to stamp out endemic corruption so all Iraqis can feel loyalty to the Government serves some real purpose.
In Syria it will require the external powers that have dictated the trajectory of the conflict to agree on and/or accept the governance model that follows on from the defeat of Islamic State.
If that be some version of the present regime then that may have to suffice.
And while some argue a continuation of Bashar al-Assad's rule in Syria will simply flan the flames of ongoing Islamist insurrection, none of the opposition groups will last long without external support. So the future stability of Syrian society is in the hands of external players as much as it is in the hands of Syrians themselves.
Reform is the best weapon
Islamic State's motto was "remaining and expanding" (Baqiyyah wa tatamaddad) that was sometimes shortened simply to "remaining". It sees itself as having generational aims — when times are not propitious it endures and then seeks to expand when conditions allow.
As much as the loss of physical territory represents a defeat for the group, there is little doubt it will continue to aspire to greater things no matter how contained it becomes. Similarly, the oxygen which it survives on is popular dissatisfaction with temporal governance so every effort needs to be made to ensure conditions, such as endemic corruption, sectarian political policies and poorly managed labour markets, do not provide the conditions groups like Islamic State can exploit in the future.
Unfortunately the unwillingness and inability of regional states to undertake meaningful political reforms in the past gives little confidence they will in the future. As a consequence, we should not be surprised if the peace becomes much more challenging to win than was the war.
Rodger Shanahan is a research fellow at the Lowy Institute.
Topics: terrorism, unrest-conflict-and-war, world-politics, iraq, syrian-arab-republic
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