BAGHDAD: A year after it was routed from Iraq in a devastating war that left entire neighborhoods and towns in ruins, the Daesh group is fighting to hang on to its last enclave in eastern Syria, engaging in deadly battles with US-backed forces.
Cornered in the desert near the Iraqi border with nowhere to run, the militants are putting up a fierce fight, inflicting hundreds of casualties among their opponents and releasing a stream of beheading videos reminiscent of the extremist group’s terrifying propaganda at the height of its power.
The battle for Hajjin has dragged on for three months, highlighting the difficulty of eradicating an extremist group determined to survive. In Iraq, there is rising concern that the group may stage a comeback. Daesh sleeper cells have recently launched deadly attacks against security forces and kidnapped and killed civilians, mostly in four northern and central provinces that were once part of the group’s self-declared caliphate.
“There is still major danger for Iraq and Syria especially in areas close to the border when it comes to Daesh,” a senior Iraqi intelligence official said, using an Arabic acronym to refer to the extremists. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media about security matters.
He said Daesh lost most of the income it once made from oil and taxes imposed in areas it controlled. The group now relies on selling gold and other reserves that they had accumulated after declaring their caliphate in June 2014. He said the money is being used to buy weapons and finance attacks in Iraq and Syria.
Another Iraqi intelligence official said Daesh has begun restructuring its command, relying more on non-Iraqi commanders after most of its leaders were killed in coalition strikes.
The Daesh group once held an area the size of Britain across vast territories straddling parts of Iraq and Syria, running a so-called caliphate and planning international attacks from its headquarters in the Syrian city of Raqqa. Tens of thousands were killed in both countries as an array of local forces, some backed by a US-led coalition, eventually drove the extremists out of virtually all the lands they once held.
Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi declared final victory over the group on Dec. 9, 2017. Two months earlier, the coalition, working with Kurdish-dominated fighters known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, liberated Raqqa after a bombing campaign that decimated much of the city.
The area that Daesh still holds in Syria represents less than 1 percent of the territory it controlled at its height. The pocket is home to some 15,000 people, including Daesh fighters and their families. The US military estimates there are about 2,000 remaining Daesh fighters there.
The SDF launched their offensive to retake Hajjin on Sept. 10. It has been a grueling campaign, with sand storms and fog at times grounding coalition aircraft, allowing the militants to launch counteroffensives that have killed hundreds of SDF fighters. IS has also taken scores of prisoners and hundreds of civilians hostage.
“It is very difficult because we are in the last stages, where almost every Daesh fighter is a suicide belt,” Brett McGurk, the White House envoy for the war against IS, said at a security conference held recently in the Gulf nation of Bahrain.
The extremists, besieged near the border, have no place to go. They are surrounded from the east and north by SDF fighters while from the south and west, Syrian government forces and their allies have closed roads to the surrounding desert.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says since the fighting began nearly three months ago, 1,616 people have been killed, mostly fighters from both sides. It said the dead include 827 Daesh gunmen, 481 SDF fighters and 308 civilians.
The fighting is now believed to be in its final stages, with SDF fighters said to have broken IS defenses and taken the fight inside the town.
The fall of Hajjin will end the group’s hold over any significant territory in Iraq or Syria, but sleeper cells in both countries will continue to stage attacks amid attempts to regroup. Daesh affiliates in Libya, Afghanistan and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula continue to stage regular attacks.
The group’s savage legacy, meanwhile, will stay for years to come.
Huge parts of Iraq and Syria are still in ruins, with little cash and — in Syria’s case — little international political will to rebuild.
Emerging from the more than three years of war, Iraq estimates that $88.2 billion is needed to rebuild the country. An international donors’ summit held early this year in Kuwait gathered pledges of $30 billion that mainly came in the form of loans, but no progress has been made to fulfil the pledges.
“The biggest problem we have is the lack of funds,” said Mustafa Al-Hiti, the head of a government-run reconstruction fund.
“What we spent till now is about 1.5 percent of what we need and that came as loans and donations,” Al-Hiti added.
Another challenge is the unexploded ordnance, mainly in the northern city of Mosul, where the climactic battle occurred. He estimated that 4 million unexploded bombs are still littered around Mosul, the largest city Daesh once held, with only 6 percent cleared so far.
Nuri Mehmud, an SDF spokesman speaking by telephone from Syria, said all of Daesh’s experienced fighters are now in the besieged area of Hajjin.
“It is a difficult battle but in the end we will wipe out Daesh,” he said.
Daesh fights to hang on a year after defeat in Iraq
Daesh fights to hang on a year after defeat in Iraq
- “There is still major danger for Iraq and Syria especially in areas close to the border when it comes to Daesh,” a senior Iraqi intelligence official said
- Huge parts of Iraq and Syria are still in ruins, with little cash and — in Syria’s case — little international political will to rebuild
How Israel leverages planning laws to entrench control over East Jerusalem
- Record home demolitions reveal how zoning, permits and land registration are used to systematically displace Palestinians
- Israeli human rights groups warn planning laws have become central tools for reshaping Jerusalem’s demography
LONDON: Last month, Jews in Israel and around the world celebrated the holiday of Hannukah, which commemorates the victory of Jewish rebels who rose up against the Greek occupiers of Jerusalem in the second century B.C.E.
Each year the week-long holiday, its timing determined by the Hebrew calendar, falls on different dates. This December it began on Dec. 14 and ended at nightfall on Dec. 22 — the same day Israeli forces bulldozed an apartment building in East Jerusalem.
This act of mass eviction left about 90 Palestinians homeless and drove home the reality that it is now the Jewish state that is the occupier in Jerusalem.
The 12-hour operation, supported by soldiers and a mob of stone-throwing Jewish youths, came without warning, despite the fact that the residents’ lawyer had a meeting scheduled with Jerusalem Municipality’s legal department that very day.
The demolition of the building, which stood on private Palestinian land, was the largest such destruction of property in 2025, but was far from an isolated case. Since the start of the year, 143 Palestinian homes had already been demolished across East Jerusalem.
But, say human rights groups in Israel, this latest demolition shows Israel is stepping up its campaign of displacement in East Jerusalem under cover of international focus on Gaza, while at the same time ramping up the development of new illegal settlements.
The day before the demolition, Israel approved the establishment of 19 new settlements in the occupied West Bank.
“The heart of the issue is the outright discrimination in urban planning policies, which has led to years of systematic and deliberate neglect of urban development for Palestinians in East Jerusalem,” said architect Sari Kronish of the Israeli nongovernmental organization Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights.
“In practice, inadequate and restrictive zoning plans were approved until they too were halted. The Palestinian population is therefore at an extreme disadvantage; there is only a nominal amount of land designated for Palestinian residential development — roughly 15 percent of East Jerusalem.
“Without residential land designation in an approved zoning plan, it is not possible to request a building permit.”
In addition, said Kronish, “the possibility of proving land ownership is also a major obstacle along the road to a building permit and depends on the regulations in place.
“Recently, these regulations have become more strict and are basically in line with the renewed process of land registration. Most of the land in East Jerusalem is not officially registered in the land registry; until 2018 the State of Israel adopted relatively lenient protocols to allow minimal planning and building despite this reality.
“But in recent years, new land registration processes have begun, replacing expropriation as the main form of land confiscation. All planning and building processes — zoning and permits — are currently subjugated to this process, and in effect halted.”
Constructed in 2014, the apartment building in Wadi Qaddum was demolished on the pretext that it lacked a building permit.
But, as Israeli human rights groups have pointed out repeatedly, building permits are impossible for Palestinians to procure without the existence of zoning plans approved by the Jerusalem municipality — plans which the Israeli authorities systematically neglect to advance or approve for Palestinian areas.
The building was constructed on a plot of land that was subsequently designated as green space, retroactively rendering it illegal.
The first attempt to knock it down, initiated by the far-right national security minister and settler leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, came in 2022. Following legal representation and the intervention of Israeli rights groups, the government granted two stays of execution, the first of 90 days and the second of 30.
These expired in February 2023, but the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stepped in at the last minute and delayed the operation.
At the time, The Times of Israel, citing a Western diplomat, reported that “several Western embassies, including the American and British missions in Israel, (had) reached out to Netanyahu’s office, expressing their opposition to the demolition.”
Now, say human rights groups, the world’s focus has moved away from events in the Occupied Territories, and the Israeli government is acting with increasing impunity.
Amy Cohen, director of international relations at the Israel NGO Ir Amim, or City of Nations, said that 2025 “saw the highest total number of demolitions in East Jerusalem on record, according to the available data.
“A total of 263 structures were demolished due to lacking building permits, including 148 residential units and 115 non-residential structures, placing 2025 at the top of the list in terms of total demolished structures.
“When comparing the number of residential units demolished, 2025 ranks second, after 2024, which recorded 181 demolished residential units, constituting the highest number of home demolitions on record.”
Israel’s motives, say human rights groups, are all too clear.
Since Israel’s occupation and illegal annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, said Cohen, “Israeli policymaking has been driven by two main factors — the demographic and the territorial. In other words, maintaining a Jewish demographic majority and seizing as much control over land and resources as possible.
“One of the main tools used to carry out this goal is deliberate housing deprivation and the policy of selective demolitions under the guise of building-regulation enforcement.
“These in turn become mechanisms of displacement, pushing Palestinians out of the city while taking over more land for settlements and other Israeli interests.”
Bimkom says Palestinians, who constitute 40 percent of Jerusalem’s population, should be given equal rights to housing and shelter.
“The most basic way of doing this is by approving zoning plans for adequate residential development for the Palestinian population while halting land registration processes and the cruel policy of demolitions,” said Kronish.
“Rather than depleting the only remaining land reserves in and around Palestinian neighborhoods for Israeli settlements, which is happening at an exponential rate, these lands could be designated to meet the dire housing needs of the local residents.”
But neither Bimkom nor Ir Amin see any hope of such a change in policy.
“Given the record number of demolitions over the past two years, the near complete halt in planning processes for Palestinians, ever-increasing challenges to obtaining a building permit, and the fact that 2026 is an election year, there is reason to assume that the rate of demolitions will only increase,” said Cohen.
“Politicians will be looking to score political points, and unfortunately Palestinians often bear the brunt of this.”
Technically, the authority to demolish houses is vested in the municipality, said Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and founder of the NGO Terrestrial Jerusalem, which monitors developments in the city that could affect the political process or spark conflict.
“But it’s also vested in the government,” he said. “Once it was the Ministry of Interior, then the ministerial responsibility was transferred to the Finance Ministry, and then last year it was transferred to the Ministry of National Security, and that means Itamar Ben Gvir.”
Seidemann says he saw the symbolic demolition in Wadi Qaddum coming.
“They needed the approval of the Knesset, and the (Joe) Biden administration had considered this to be important enough that they interceded, and the move was not carried out back then. But then right before the summer recess, at 11 o’clock at night, they passed it.”
All the recent demolitions, he said, have been concentrated in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, “and there is clear evidence that this is part of the drive to encircle the Old City with settlements and settlement-related projects.”
The international community, he believes, has lost the will to intervene. “That has been the case since the beginning of the war,” he said, referring to the conflict in Gaza that began in October 2023.
“But with all the crises the world is currently dealing with, whether it’s climate change, Ukraine and now Venezuela, there just isn’t a lot of bandwidth left to deal with this.
“And it’s personal. I see the political officers in the embassies and the consulates, and they’re just overwhelmed.”
Once, he said, “in spite of all of his bluster, Netanyahu was risk-averse and engageable. He would be attentive, especially to the US, but also to European capitals. Now, he is following Ben-Gvir’s lead and he is un-engageable. He listens to nobody.”
One symptom of that is the dramatic increase in demolitions of Palestinian homes and the building of illegal settlements. But other consequences may be looming.
Given all the increased pressures on the Palestinian people since 2023, including the destruction of their homes and settler attacks, Seidemann has grave fears about what might happen in Jerusalem during Ramadan in February and March this year.
“The past couple of years, the Biden administration had senior officials sitting in Jerusalem, monitoring things, interceding, mediating, and it worked. They were able to elicit restraint from Netanyahu. But there is no guarantee that will be the case this year.
“Ben-Gvir is making no secret of his intention to radically change the status quo at Al-Aqsa, the Temple Mount. The West Bank and East Jerusalem is a tinder box, the entire region is on the brink in every imaginable front, and there is no issue more sensitive than Al-Aqsa.
“And what starts in Jerusalem doesn’t stay in Jerusalem.”
