Quora Answer: As of 2019, has ISIS been Wiped Out?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “As of 2019, has ISIS essentially been wiped out?”

The question assumes ISIS is the kind of organisation that can be wiped out.  It cannot.  Not because it is invincible, but because the framework of the question is wrong.  ISIS is not a conventional armed force.  It does not have a headquarters that can be bombed, a command structure that can be decapitated, or a supply chain that can be severed. It is a cellular network organised for asymmetrical warfare — each cell operating independently, claiming loose affiliation to an umbrella ideology rather than reporting to a central authority.  Defeating it militarily and denying it territory is necessary.  It is not sufficient.  You can destroy their physical manifestation without touching the ideology that produced it.  The Wahhabi ideology is the threat.  The territorial entity was merely its most recent expression.

The numbers support this.  At its peak in 2014, ISIS controlled approximately 100,000 square kilometres of territory across Iraq and Syria, governed up to eight million people, and generated an estimated US$1 billion to US$2 billion annually from oil sales, taxation, looting, and kidnapping.  By 2019, the territorial control was gone.  The organisation was not.  The United Nations estimated in 2019 that between 14,000 and 18,000 ISIS fighters remained active across Iraq and Syria alone — operating as an insurgency rather than a proto-state, but operating, nonetheless.

By 2026, the picture has not fundamentally changed.  ISIS affiliates operate across West Africa, the Sahel, East Africa, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and the Sinai Peninsula.  The Islamic State in Khorasan Province — ISIS-K — carried out the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow in March 2024, killing 145 people.  The organisation that lost its territory in 2019 has metastasised across three continents in the years since.

The Three Requirements for Actual Defeat

Defeating ISIS requires three things simultaneously.  Military pressure alone achieves one of them at best.

The first is ideological refutation.  ISIS draws its theological legitimacy from Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of Islam — specifically from a reading of Islamic jurisprudence that classical Sunni scholarship — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali — categorically rejects.  The historical Hanbali madzhab, from which Wahhabism claims descent, bears no resemblance to the ideology that Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab an-Najdi constructed in the eighteenth century and that ISIS weaponised in the twenty-first.

This theological point is not merely academic.  ISIS recruits by presenting its ideology as the authentic, uncorrupted Islam — the false claim of being the practice of the earliest generations stripped of centuries of accumulated bid’ah.  The refutation of this claim requires scholars with the classical credentials to demonstrate, from within the Islamic tradition, that ISIS’s jurisprudence is not authentic Islam, but a modern innovation dressed in the costume of antiquity.  Western governments consistently fail to understand this.  They fund counter-extremism programmes that address psychology, sociology, and political grievance without engaging the theological argument.  The theological argument is the one ISIS is actually making.  Leaving it uncontested concedes the field.

The pattern of radicalisation is also systematically misunderstood.  The Sri Lankan Easter Sunday bombers of 2019 came from wealthy, educated families.  Usamah ibn Muhammad ibn ‘Awad ibn Ladin — the founder of al-Qa’idah — was the son of a Saudi construction billionaire worth an estimated US$5 billion.  Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Amir ‘Awad as-Sayyid ‘Aththa’, the lead hijacker of the 11^th September attacks, held a master’s degree in urban planning from the Technical University of Hamburg.  The radicalisation pathway does not begin with poverty and desperation.  It begins with ideological exposure among people with sufficient education to engage with abstract theological arguments and sufficient leisure to pursue them.  The average poor Muslim is far too occupied with material survival to read Sayyid Ibrahim Husayn Shadzili Quthb.  The radicalisation threat runs upward through the socioeconomic spectrum, not downward.  Counter-extremism strategies that focus on economically marginalised communities are addressing the wrong population.

The second is addressing legitimate political grievance.  This is the point that Western governments find most uncomfortable because it requires acknowledging that some Muslim communities have genuine, documented reasons to feel excluded from the societies they inhabit.  ISIS propaganda does not succeed by lying about everything.  It succeeds by taking legitimate grievances — discrimination, political exclusion, the double standard applied to Muslim civilian casualties versus Western ones — and channelling them toward an illegitimate response. The propaganda is most effective where the grievances are most real.

Undercutting the propaganda requires undercutting the grievance.  Muslim communities that have a genuine stake in the societies they inhabit — real economic participation, real political representation, real institutional protection from discrimination — have no reason to tolerate an ideology that promises them a separate state because the existing one has failed them.  They also become willing partners in the human intelligence collection, which is the most effective tool against cellular networks.  No surveillance programme has ever matched the intelligence value of a community that trusts the state enough to report suspicious activity within its own ranks.

The third is financial interdiction.  Every terrorist attack costs money.  The 11^th September attacks cost an estimated US$400,000 to US$500,000.  The 2002 Bali bombings cost approximately US$35,000.  Even at the lower end, sustained terrorist operations require funding streams that leave traces — wire transfers, hawalah networks, cash movements across borders, charitable front organisations.

The most significant and most consistently ignored funding stream for Wahhabi radicalisation globally is Gulf state philanthropy — specifically Saudi and Qatari funding of mosques, madrasas, and Islamic centres in Western countries and across the Muslim world.  The UK’s 2017 Home Office report on foreign funding of extremism named Gulf state sources as the primary external driver of Islamist extremism in Britain.  The report was suppressed for four years before being partially released in 2021.  The suppression was not coincidental.  Gulf state petroleum relationships create diplomatic inconveniences that override national security considerations with depressing regularity.

Foreign funding of indigenous Muslim religious institutions should be curtailed, comprehensively, with no exceptions for politically inconvenient donors.  An ideology that requires external funding to sustain itself is an ideology that can be starved.  The will to do so has consistently been absent from Western policy because the countries funding the ideology are simultaneously the countries supplying the petroleum.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

ISIS has not been wiped out.  It has dispersed, adapted, and metastasised.  The territorial caliphate is gone.  The ideology that produced it is not.  The funding streams that sustain that ideology continue.  The theological refutation that would undermine it at its root remains largely absent from counter-extremism strategy.  The political grievances that make the ideology appealing to alienated young Muslims in Western cities remain unaddressed in any systematic way.  What has been achieved is the destruction of the most visible and operationally concentrated manifestation of the threat.  That achievement is real and should not be minimised.  It is also insufficient and should not be overstated.

Vigilance and an absolute intolerance of Wahhabism and its funding infrastructure are the minimum requirements for containing the threat.  Containment is not victory.  Victory requires the ideological, political, and financial interdiction that governments have consistently lacked the will to pursue — because pursuing it requires confronting allies, engaging theological arguments, and taking political risks that electoral cycles make unattractive.  The false caliphate fell.  The conditions that produced it remain.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code