Originally ISIS was welcomed with open arms into the Sunni areas in Iraq and Syria, but they have left a legacy of brutality and misery, and are unlikely to see the welcome mat rolled out for them again.

Since Kobane the alliance and Russian air power has destroyed the financial base of ISIS, killed thousands of its fighters, and destroyed its heavy weapons, leaving it weakened and easily beaten by their ragtag opponents. ISIS in Mosul and Fallujah are encircled and retreating to an ever smaller domain in the centre, and Raqqa the capital is being isolated and softened up, losing its leaders every couple of weeks to drones. And even in Libya ISIS is on the run. The original flood of overseas fighters has dried up, and the ones left are killing each other in fits of paranoia. The jig is up and they know it, and can expect no mercy from their captors, or from those they previously brutalised.

So where to now? We can only hope that the populations in the Middle East has learnt the horrific lessons of Islamic extremism and sectarianism and will move towards integration and democracy.

pure Islam will continue to grow whether by Hamas, Isis or in America.

Shadow, I think you misunderstand the problem in the first place. Militant Islam really came to rise and spread due to the Saudis pumping billions of petrodollars into their promotion around the world of the Wahabi version, even under our very noses, in their religious text books. This due to the deal that the Saud princes did with the Wahabs, the Sauds would be in charge of oil and business, the Wababs in charge of religion. That is how Saudi Arabia came to be in the first place.

So the Taliban, Al Queda, ISIS, and other militant forms of Islam, are all about the militant form of the ideology, as preached by Sayd Qutb and similar. That will not just go away and turn into democracy. It will simply go quiet and then spring up somewhere else. The Saudis should be held to account for the textbooks which they are still promoting around the world. Wahabi Islam and Sunni Islam are not the same.

Yabby,

I don't disagree with you on the origins of Islamic fundamentalism. However, Wahhabism is an offshoot of the Sunni sect (Saudi is about 85% Sunni), and I also agree that the defeat of ISIS is not the end.

However, the two lessons that Sunnis should have learnt are:

1) There is no fundamentalist paradise,
2) Jihadis are easily beaten.

Shadow, Wahabism is a much more hate preaching, militant version of Sunni intrepretations. Their fundamental belief is not so far off what ISIS believe, which is the problem. The Sauds are happy to bankroll all this, from building of mosques around the world, to financing teachers and reading material to promote the Wahab teachings, as it keeps them in charge of the Saudi oil wells, which is their piggy bank. Tribal thinking still dominates in places like Saudi Arabia.

This ideology does indeed keep spreading, even if the West puts out a few fires here and there. Think Yemen, Libya, Taliban controlled areas of both Afghanistan and Pakistan, various countries in Africa, it is a long list. Ideology is in peoples minds, not in country borders. Saudi petrodollars continue to fund that and we in the West refuse to challenge them because of oil. So defeat ISIS, your problem is not going to go away, simply surface else where under new leaders.

End of the Islamic State? Pshaw! Where did that nonsense come from? It should have been wiped out long ago, but the West has been too yellow to do the job. It will be around for many more years, if the West doesn't get back to its values and fight for what it used to believe.