Local sources indicate the number could be as high as 30,000. Airwars, an independent organisation that tracks casualties casualties caused by the US-led air campaign, estimates that as many as 12,000 civilians were killed in the bombardment. The cities of Mosul and Raqqa, and many others, still lie in ruins. But while they were extremely effective, this tactic left a trail of destruction. The coalition carried out more than 30,000 airstrikes across both countries. Over the next few years, thousands of coalition airstrikes - most the vast majority of which were carried out by the US - would clear the path for local forces on the ground in Iraq and Syria to recapture ground from Isis. It would be the first action in a long US-led coalition involvement that would prove decisive in defeating the Isis caliphate. In August 2014, as thousands of Yazidi civilians were surrounded by Isis fighters, the US launched the first airstrikes against the group. That terrible crime, and the threat it posed to other areas of Iraq, prompted the US to intervene against Isis. The UN would later categorise the attacks as a genocide. Isis fighters slaughtered thousands of civilians and took thousands of women as sex slaves. The town and the surrounding area is the traditional homeland of people from the Yazidi faith, whom Isis considers heretics. In 2014, the group carried out one of its worst atrocities when it overran the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq. The battle was not always coordinated between these powers, but it is a sign of the brutality of Isis that they all found common cause to fight it. The fight to defeat the caliphate brought together the bitterest of enemies, and cost tens of thousands of lives.īy the end, the terror group could count among its battlefield opponents two military superpowers in the US and Russia, along with the Syrian army, the Syrian armed opposition, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) the Iraqi army, a number of Iraqi Shia militias, Turkey and a global coalition of some 70 countries. Nevertheless, the collapse of the physical caliphate marks a significant ideological and military setback for the world’s most powerful jihadist group. Both countries are far from a recovery, and the conditions that gave rise to Isis in the first place still exist in both. Many people fleeing from the last Isis-held territory, including women and children, still proclaimed their loyalty to the group. There are also no signs that the Isis ideology, which brought thousands of Muslims from across the world and won it followers among the downtrodden of Iraq and Syria, has been truly defeated. But Washington’s long term plans for stopping the rebirth of Isis are unclear. The president later walked back on that decision, saying that a few hundred troops would stay. But Donald Trump has already announced his intention to withdraw all of the 2,000 US troops stationed there. The Syrian Democratic Forces have said that a continued US presence in the country is essential to ensure the enduring defeat of Isis there. James Jeffrey, the US Special Representative for Syria, said recently that Washington believes there are “between 15,000 and 20,000 Daesh armed adherents active, although many are in sleeper cells, in Syria and in Iraq.” In Syria too, attacks are an almost daily occurrence. In Iraq, it is following much the same pattern it did during its rapid rise to power: kidnappings, assassinations, and roadside ambushes aimed at intimidating locals and restoring its extortion rackets. It is already carrying out attacks in areas that were previously “liberated” from its control. The vast territory that Isis once held earned it massive wealth and helped spread its terror on a grand scale, but even without it the group remains a potent threat.