After nine gruelling months of street-to-street fighting and near-continuous aerial bombardment, Iraqi forces in July 2017 wrested control of Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, from the brutal hands of ISIS.
Months in the making, the victory could not have come when it did without intense support from a US-led coalition that helped to arm, train and equip Iraqi soldiers.
It also provided key information and air support to the local forces that only three years earlier had been humiliated by the speed and scope of the ISIS advance.
Mosul's liberation stands as a watershed moment in the fight against ISIS and signalled the start of the end for the terror group that at its peak in 2014 controlled about one third of Syria and Iraq, murderously governing a territory almost the size of England.
“The writing was on the wall that the so called caliphate's days were numbered,” said Nathan Sales of the Atlantic Council, who served as co-ordinator for counter-terrorism and the special envoy to the global coalition to defeat ISIS under former president Donald Trump.
Mr Sales, who began that role a month after the battle of Mosul ended, said it was a time of optimism in Iraq and in the Trump administration.
“With Iraq’s second-largest city now having been liberated and in friendly hands, it was only a matter of time before the campaign ended in the total defeat of the so-called ISIS caliphate,” he told The National.
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