The Islamic State just lost its capital at Raqqa and with it the last of the terrorist group’s fantasies of establishing a Middle East caliphate.
In recent years, ISIS has horrified global audiences with video clips of unspeakable atrocities. What sort of humans could behead, incinerate, drown, torture and blow up innocent civilians, mock and record such horror, and then narrate their macabre videos for a world audience?
How could such pre-modern psychopaths ever be defeated, given that in a matter of months ISIS had managed to overrun vast swaths of Iraq and Syria?
The zealotry of the Islamic State in celebrating the unthinkable added to its cult of invincibility. Young would-be jihadists from the Western world flocked to the group’s Middle East compounds, eager to engage in viciousness as if it were the latest video game.
Dejected Middle Eastern armies seemed to have no answer for the medieval violence of ISIS. Impotent Western leaders either ignored or denied the group’s homicidal appeal. Indeed, in 2014, pessimistic analysts were predicting that ISIS might soon carve out enough oil-rich parts of Iraq and Syria to spread its barbarism throughout the region.
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