The United States has spent more than a decade trying to eliminate al Qaeda, but despite decimating the group, its fugitive leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remains alive and the group’s offshoots operate in Mali, Yemen, Somalia, and a growing list of other countries. Israel has spent decades battling Hezbollah and Hamas, but the groups remain capable of launching large-scale combat operations like this past summer’s Gaza war. Destroying an organization means eradicating it for good, as the Allied powers did to the Nazi party in Germany during World War II, said Christopher Harmer, a former U.S. Navy officer and an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War. “If you use the word ‘destroy,’ you’re talking about a comprehensive military and political victory,” Harmer said. “And if the mission is to destroy [the Islamic State], what we’re doing now is wholly inadequate.”
Destroying the Islamic State, by this definition, would require eradicating or neutralizing its tens of thousands of fighters, kicking them out of the territories that IS holds in Iraq, and depriving the group of its base of operations in Syria, where Obama’s own military advisers have said the fight must turn in order to halt the Islamic State’s advances. The fact that the group has recruited hundreds of fighters with Western passports, as well as its massive stockpile of cash and access to oil revenue, also make it particularly resilient.
The president’s choice of words when he talks about fighting the Islamic State is crucial because it will shape the future of the U.S. military’s intervention in Iraq, which has to date consisted of more than 150 airstrikes carried out in coordination Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces. The strikes have managed to pick off handfuls of Islamic State vehicles — and a steady stream of press releases from U.S. Central Command documents those victories down to the number of Humvees and pickup trucks bombed by the high-tech American warplanes. But the United States hasn’t said how many Islamic State fighters have been killed, and the campaign so far appears not to have made a significant dent in the organization’s ability to move freely in Iraq and Syria or hold onto the major cities it now controls in both countries. As soon as the Islamic State is knocked back in one area, it pops up in another, as it has in recent days at a dam in Haditha, where U.S. planes have once again been bombing the militants. The United States began bombing on Sunday, Sept. 7, to prevent Islamic State fighters from taking control of the dam, which provides fresh water to millions of Iraqis and is the second-largest source of hydroelectric power in Iraq.
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