"Now the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are over, almost all British troops are back home and the Americans are even about to do a peace deal with the Taliban, surely there’s nothing left to drive recruitment to the cause.

That argument is fundamentally flawed. British involvement on the ground is minimal, yes, but consider the huge shift in the last decade to remote warfare, the use of strike aircraft, armed drones, special forces and surrogates rather than tens of thousands of boots on the ground. Operations like these are scarcely reported in the mass media and you have to go to more specialised sources to understand what is happening. Oxford Research Group’s Remote Warfare Programme is one of the very few groups analysing this change, with Airwars and Every Casualty reporting on the consequences. 

From late 2014 through to the present – though the first three years were the most significant – a classic and largely unreported remote war, led by the US, has been fought to suppress Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The UK has been a key part of this, with the Royal Air Force heavily involved, operating from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus as well as bases in the Gulf states. Very few western troops have been on the ground, but according to US Special Operations Command this war has killed some 60,000 paramilitaries through a huge programme of air and drone strikes aided by special forces. Many thousands of civilians have also been killed, but the US, UK and other participants have been very reluctant to discuss them."

—Paul Rogers, 08 August 2019