On June 10, 2014, Mosul fell; nineteen days later a caliphate was proclaimed. It took five years to erase it from the map — on March 23, 2019, at Baghouz, the territorial caliphate ended.
For five years, the most feared organization on earth was also a state. It held cities, taxed citizens, and minted its own logic of horror — and then, between 2017 and 2019, it lost everything it had taken. ISIS burned bright, and died small.
