Terror attacks prove we are winning war against IS

WHAT the terrorists don’t want you to know is that while they are killing children in Manchester, we are wiping out Islamic State.

THE horrific attack on innocent children at an Ariana Grande concert is a new low for terrorism. Just when you thought its practitioners couldn’t descend any closer to the depths of Hell they have found a way to offend humanity on an even more grotesque level.

There is no act more barbaric and cruel than the killing of children and yet within hours sites associated with ISIS were celebrating their deaths. This is a group that does not just kill for a demented ideology, it kills for joy. It takes pleasure in death, it revels in the suffering of innocents.

Whether ISIS was directly responsible for the attack remains to be confirmed however it almost certainly inspired it. Either way, its revelry is enough to condemn it.

And yet buried under the horror and carnage at Manchester Arena there is a kernel of truth that may in time bring some comfort to the broken families — although God knows it will never be enough.

And that is this: ISIS is waging a terror war in the West because it is losing the real war in the Middle East. They are targeting children in Manchester because they are too weak to fight real soldiers in their much-vaunted homeland. They are attacking us in more and more cowardly and desperate ways because we are beating them.

ISIS has gone from an expanding terrorist army that shocked an unprepared enemy into retreat, to an increasingly ragtag and besieged outfit that is losing territory. It lost around a quarter of its territory in Syria and Iraq last year alone. The population under its control has plummeted from 10 million to six million unfortunate souls.

Even as you read this, Islamic State is making its final doomed stand in the major Iraqi stronghold of Mosul. On the very same day as the as-yet unknown terrorist carried out the latest UK attack, the city was being liberated and the UN envoy for Iraq declared that ISIS’s defeat was imminent and the days of the caliphate “numbered”. An Iraqi general says Islamic State is “drawing its last dying breath”.

Iraqi counter-terrorism forces advance through West Mosul on Monday, the very same day as the Manchester attack. Picture: AFP/Ahmad Al-Rubaye

Indeed, the primary impediment to driving Islamic State out of Mosul and wiping it out altogether is that it is using innocent people as human shields. Just as it does in the West, it practices war against civilians in its own so-called “homeland” because it cannot win a war against genuine combatants. That is how pathetic these self-proclaimed warriors are.

This has made the path to victory slow but it has not made it any less inevitable.

Unfortunately, the cost of Islamic State’s retreat has been that it has become more desperate and more brutal — if that were even once considered possible.

Testimony by the RAND Corporation to the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security in the wake of the 2015 Paris attacks — to which the Manchester attack bears such a grim resemblance — noted this dark irony.

“Paradoxically, success against ISIL in Syria and Iraq may heighten the threat of terrorism beyond,” terrorism expert and former special forces captain Brian Michael Jenkins told the committee.

“As ISIL becomes more desperate, its support for terrorist operations abroad will increase. Some foreign fighters will come back seeking revenge for their defeat. ISIL supporters will want to prove the struggle is not lost.”

A map of IS territory in Syria and Iraq at its height in 2014 -- right up to the doorstep of Baghdad.

US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis at a press briefing at the Pentagon last week shows how that territory has disintegrated. Picture: AFP/Saul Loeb

Indeed, only in February the UK’s newly appointed terrorism chief Max Hill warned that Britain was facing a terror threat as great if not greater than the days of the IRA because of ISIS fighters returning from defeats abroad.

“I think the intensity and the potential frequency of serious plot planning — with a view to indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians of whatever race or colour in metropolitan areas — represents an enormous on-going risk that none of us can ignore,” he told London’s Sunday Telegraph, adding: “Of course the imminent fall of Mosul and perhaps the prospective retaking of Raqqa are both bound to lead to a higher instance of returning fighters.”

Today’s events further proved those dark fears true.

In other words, the increase in terrorist attacks is not a sign that we are losing, it is a sign that we are winning — even though it doesn’t feel like it on days like today.

There is of course no force on earth that can console a parent for the loss of their child. I know something of this from personal experience.

But it is also wrong to think that horror events like Manchester, like Paris, like Brussels, like Berlin, like London and all the others around the world are the end.

They are devastating, they are crushing, but they are not the end.

The end is when we finish them, and finish them we will.