The War on ISIS Held the Middle East Together
“With the fall of Raqqa, the sad story will pick up exactly where it left off in 2014.”
The fall of the Islamic State’s stronghold and symbolic capital in Raqqa brings a certain grim satisfaction. It was in this regional riverbank city that the grisly, nihilistic group honed its medieval methods, spreading terror with acts of violence both intimate and public. A coalition consisting of Kurds, the U.S. military, and a supporting phalanx of Syrian-Arab militias, apparently drove the last ISIS holdouts from Raqqa on Tuesday. No longer will ISIS plant severed heads on stakes in the main town square and spew hate from repurposed churches and government buildings, painted black.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The end of ISIS’s temporal empire and
