Islamic State a destructive force that offers no answers

Fighters of Syrian Democratic Forces march along a road after Raqqa was liberated from Islamic State militants, in Raqqa. Picture: Reuters

The terrible fate of Raqqa, the ­Syrian city that became Islamic State’s defacto capital, illustrates with brutal clarity the barrenness of the Islamist ideology.

In three years of control in Raqqa, Islamic State built nothing, achieved nothing, and has left nothing.

Now it has gone, but the message the world’s Muslim community must heed is plain: Islamic extremism is a destructive force that offers no answers to the complex political and economic problems confronting the region’s Sunni communities.

Raqqa’s liberation is a profound blow not only against ISIS, but against the toxic ideology is ­espouses. Ever since it fell to the militants in 2014 Raqqa has been used as a symbol of Islamic State’s strength and power.

At the height of its influence ­ISIS claimed control of territory stretching from Syria across northern Iraq and encompassing the second city of Mosul.

Its propaganda ­machine pumped out thousands of images depicting life in the “caliphate” as idyllic, prosperous and pious. Hospitals tended to the sick, schools educated the young, the markets brimmed with produce.

Raqqa was the centrepiece of this vast myth. But life inside the caliphate was far from a religious idyll. Still, the myth worked.

ISIS attracted tens of thousands of foreign fighters and displaced al-Qa’ida as the leader of international jihad. It reinvented the business model for Islamic ­terrorism, discarding large-scale attacks in favour of small, spontaneous ­assaults that were much harder to detect and disrupt.

Now, the defeat of Raqqa symbolises the rapidly collapsing fortunes of ISIS itself.

ISIS is on the run. Of course it will continue to inspire attacks in the West — counter-­ terrorism authorities are bracing for a new wave in Islamist violence as its fighters flee the battlefield. Its outposts in Libya, The Philippines and Afghanistan are now the emerging fronts in the fight against Sunni militancy.

But just as has Islamic State’s power been discredited, so has the militant version of Sunni Islam that inspired it. Islamic State’s ­Salafist ideology — broadly shared by al-Qa’ida and other ­Islamist groups — has shown itself to be useless at anything other than destruction.

This is no surprise to most who understood ISIS as a group driven purely by ideology and a thirst for power. But many in the Muslim world, particularly the young, saw Islamic State’s military success as evidence off its strength, rather than the weakness of Iraqi and Syrian armed forces. They saw its caliphate as a source of Sunni pride. And they saw Islamic State’s rise in the region as a powerful ­response to the growing Shia ­influence.

These problems remain. But now, hopefully, fewer Muslims will look to ISIS for the ­answers.