Destruction of the ISIS caliphate in eastern Syria and northern Iraq
The Obama administration was the one to launch an international coalition that was supposed to destroy the redoubt of the Islamic State back in August 2014. The anti-ISIS campaign was so successful, that it scored victory after victory in 2015 and 2016.
ISIS eventually lost complete control of its last oil field in October 2016, destroying its entire economic basis. The same month, coalition forces launched an offensive that was meant to retake Mosul, which was the last Iraqi city in ISIS hands, but also the extremely symbolically important Syrian town of Dabiq.
Trump maintained the anti-ISIS campaign in 2017 and 2018, and it remained successful. In fact, it even culminated in a U.S. raid that managed to kill the ISIS commander Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in October 2019.
ISIS is still an inspiration for terror attacks, but the Obama-Trump operation was successful, marking the end to ISIS’s attempts to found a territorial state, and completely ruining its conventional military forces.
