The Islamic State group once drew recruits from near and far with promises of paradise but now bodies of jihadists lie in mass graves or at the mercy of wild dogs as its "caliphate" collapses.
Flies buzz around human remains poking through the dusty earth in the Iraqi town of Dhuluiyah, 90 kilometres (55 miles) north of Baghdad, at a hastily-dug pit containing the bodies of dozens of IS fighters killed in 2015.
"They should have ended up in the stomachs of stray dogs," local police officer Mohammed al-Juburi told AFP.
"We buried them here not out of love but because we wanted to avoid diseases."
At one stage, IS ruthlessly wielded power over a vast swathe of territory straddling Iraq and Syria, but a military onslaught on multiple fronts has seen its fiefdom shrink to a last few pockets.
Since the launch in 2014 of air strikes in Iraq and Syria against the group, a US-led coalition says around 80,000 jihadists have been killed.
The overall number of dead is higher if you include those targeted by Russian and Syrian strikes.
Three observations:
- Indonesia, capital Jakarta, is a huge nation, with an enormous Muslim presence. Some editor there felt safe enough to run this story.
- Yes, the efforts to curtail ISIS began in 2014, after they raped and pillaged mercilessly, while President Obama dismissed them as 'junior varsity', not really worth worrying about.
- His successor has taken them very seriously. Every stump speech spoke of 'Radical Islamic Terrorism' and contained the phrase 'Kick the hell out of ISIS'. The Donald, the world is beginning to discover, is a man of his word.
Dead jihadis can't plant car bombs, rape women and children, kidnap innocents, burn prisoners alive, behead victims on camera, run trucks through crowds. The Donald understands something his predecessor never could wrap his head around: The jihadis crossed over into a moral Point of No Return, a place past re-integration into the civilized world. The only sane and moral course of action is to run them to ground, and bury them into the unmarked graves they earned.
It is a horrible thing to have to say this, but this is the path they chose. May Providence grant success to those tasked with hunting the monsters down.
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