The rise and fall of ISIS, 10 years on

Hamzeh Hadad, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, says that brief moment of unity defied many expert predictions that Iraq would permanently fragment.

“Many - and at the time I thought it was exaggerated - were questioning the existence of the modern Iraqi state, and today not only is that state still there, it is stronger than it has ever been since 1980.

“In 2014, people were questioning what the Iraqi state would look like; that is not a question in 2024. Even with regard to Iraqi Kurdistan, the threat of secession is non-existent after the failure of the 2017 independence referendum.”

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