(CNN) Earlier this year I spent almost two months in northeast Syria covering what we thought was the final battle against ISIS. The so-called caliphate that stretched from the outskirts of Baghdad to western Syria, that ruled over more than ten million people, had been reduced to the remote town of Baghouz on the banks of the Euphrates. In the end the "caliphate" was little more than a sprawling expanse of rubble and mangled cars, strewn with the corpses of ISIS fighters. But it wasn't the final battle. We were wrong.

Source: CNN October 14, 2019 11:32 UTC