Why was the war against ISIS a waste?

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(CNN) - Earlier this year, I spent almost two months in northeastern Syria covering what we thought was the final battle against ISIS. The so-called caliphate that extended from the outskirts of Baghdad to western Syria, which ruled over ten million people, had been reduced to the remote city of Baghouz, on the banks of the Euphrates.

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In the end, the "caliphate" was little more than an extension of rubble and shattered cars, scattered over the bodies of ISIS fighters.

But it was not the final battle. We were wrong.

Thousands of ISIS fighters surrendered, and many thousands more, their widows and orphans, their wives and children, ended up in prisons and detention camps administered by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

However, just a few days after the Turkish army and its Syrian allies invaded northeastern Syria last week, hundreds of people have escaped and, as the offensive continues and the SDFs are under increasing pressure, they probably some more will come out of captivity.

A few weeks before the fall of Baghouz, I interviewed one of the women of ISIS.

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"God is testing us," he said. "The unworthy will go away, and the righteous will remain."

Few of the women of ISIS or the fighters we interviewed admitted defeat.

Omar, a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Syria, told me: "Maybe Americans rule the world today, but Almighty God promised Muslims that, in the end, the world will be ruled by Islam."

It was, they insisted, a temporary setback. ISIS, they promised, would return.

And they were probably right.

ISIS fighters, free

In September, ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi urged his followers in an audio message to break the walls of prisons and camps and free his brothers. And so it has happened. As Turkey presses its offensive, the SDFs will be forced to keep their men and women away from surveillance of prisons and camps and send them to the front.

In al-Hol camp, where thousands of ISIS family members are being held, prisoners are already pressing. An SDF official told CNN on Friday that women were burning tents and attacking SDF staff and administrative offices. Weapons have been smuggled into the field, where radicals have continued to enforce the draconian laws of the old caliphate, sometimes imposing lethal punishment on those who leave the line.

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And help is near.

Pentagon officials have said for months that thousands of ISIS fighters and supporters are loose in Syria and Iraq. They carry out regular "blow and leak" attacks. They are diminished, but not eliminated.

ISIS has stood out for a long time to take advantage of power gaps, and now one is opening.

The war against ISIS, supported by the then president of the United States, Barack Obama, and carried out by his successor, President Donald Trump, was in vain.

We saw, while the battle for Baghouz was spreading, American, British and French special forces handling artillery and mortar positions around the city while the US-led anti-ISIS coalition fighter planes hit targets on the ground. We saw American, British and French intelligence officers selecting and questioning everyone who left Baghouz.

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SDF fighters, including Kurds, Arabs and Christians, pressed on the ground, defying explosive traps, car bombs and suicides. The SDF says that more than 11,000 of its soldiers, men and women, died in the war.

And now, in less than a week, everything accomplished and sacrificed, all lives and treasures lost, have been undone.

The Turkish forces, along with their Syrian allies, are beating the SDF, and now the Syrian army is entering the fray after the SDF reached an agreement with Damascus. The United States says it will undertake a "deliberate withdrawal from northeastern Syria" because, in the words of US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, US forces "are likely to be caught between two opposing and advancing armies and it is a very unsustainable situation. "

So, the United States is clearing and running away, abandoning those who fought alongside them to defeat ISIS once and for all, or so we think. Since last December, President Trump has been in a hurry to get US forces out of Syria, apparently indifferent to the consequences.

And, of course, the term "deliberate withdrawal" is to talk about the government for something much simpler: treason and withdrawal.

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