What, then, were the strategic objectives of ISIS’s doomed resistance these last few months? While its leaders persistently proclaimed that victory was just around the corner, and while the rank-and-file were probably fighting under the pretense that they might actually win, something more abstract seems to have been driving the battle. At its heart has been a compulsive obsession, not so much with defense as with narrative—the caliphate has been doing all it can to make sure it could be seen to be putting up a fight. In that sense, much of what has happened since late 2016 can be seen as an exercise in propaganda—expensive, wasteful propaganda, but propaganda all the same.

ISIS has almost certainly been planning for this moment since 2014. By seizing as much territory as it did back then, its leaders were violating one of the key principles of non-state on state irregular warfare: Act scarce, and never present an obvious target. Given their proven insurgent pedigree, they will almost certainly have been aware of this. Nevertheless, by taking over Mosul—a city of some 2 million people—they laid the foundations for the apparent catastrophe that their organization now faces.

But what if this “catastrophe” is what ISIS wants? The group has been counter-intuitive in the past, so why not now?

If statehood was indeed the Islamic State’s aim, it has resoundingly failed. However, if it really hoped to establish a lasting, viable administration, it would not have raped, murdered, and terrorized its way across the Middle East and North Africa in the way it did, let alone systematically provoked the international community into forming a coalition to destroy it.

What if, more than anything else including territory, the group just wants permanence, to be the ideological hegemon of global jihadism? In this pursuit, the realization of ideological aspirations is far more important than the permanent administration of any piece of land, even if it comes at great material cost.

Viewed through this lens, ISIS’s most counter-intuitive acts become intuitive, if not ingenious, parts of a narrative-led strategy, one that prioritizes conceptual longevity over anything else.

For example, while the beheadings and war crimes that provoked the international intervention in Iraq and Syria may have materially hurt it, they also allowed it to wrest control of the global jihadist mantle, and claim to be singlehandedly taking the fight to the “Crusader enemy.” So too did its capture of Mosul and caliphate declaration in June 2014, even though neither made insurgent “sense.”

The fact is that, although ISIS’s audacious ultraviolence ultimately set the scene for its material undoing, it also meant that it could work towards creating the world it wanted to inhabit—a polarized, turbulent place that accommodated the jihadist ideology uncannily well.