Loading He was an important figure in the movement, an orator and strategist elected by his peers to lead his clique of Utopian butchers. They're Utopian because they claim to pursue a vision of a caliphate of perfect sharia law, according to their own interpretation. And butchers because they murder everyone who has another view. He styled himself Abu Bakr because that was the name of the first of the caliphs and the father-in-law of the prophet Mohammed. And he used the name al-Baghdadi because it means "from Baghdad", which he was not, as a claim on further legitimacy. He was just the latest one in a line of violent, fundamentalist salafists acting out the forlorn vengeance scheme first conceived by a wayward philosopher of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Sayyid Qutb, in the 1950s. Qutb got his dream of visiting the US but was so disenchanted that he decided to try to destroy the West rather than emulate it. He was hanged in 1966 for plotting the assassination of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. And al-Baghdadi will not be the last because Daesh's real appeal was not its leader or the group itself but the idea it represents. Violent salafi-jihadi ideology, like money, is fungible. If one outlet for the ideology is blocked, it simply finds another. The Western world was satisfied with the defeat of al-Qaeda, and initially failed to notice that its work was taken up by Daesh.

Even if Daesh is smashed, another vessel will form and carry on its malevolent mission. The ideology, the work, the mission will live on with new leaders and new energy. Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit: Why? Because it serves a real need: "What the Middle East needs right now is a secular force that dreams a secular dream. At the moment, the only 'dream' is the caliphate," writes the chair of the British think tank Quilliam, Maajid Nawaz, a reformed extremist who went on to advise British prime ministers Labor and Tory alike on counter-terrorism. Perhaps the greatest achievement of bin Laden and al-Baghdadi is that the movement is now more widespread globally than ever. After the obliteration of its "caliphate" and the reported death of al-Baghdadi, violent salafist jihad is now transforming again. Illustration: Andrew Dyson Credit:

And, despite Trump's best efforts to belittle al-Baghdadi as a "gutless animal" who died "whining", he will be seen by Islamist sympathisers as having "martyred" himself if Trump's version is correct and he suicided rather than accept capture. Indeed, Trump's unseemly public gloating over the gory detail of the killing of a fugitive terrorist does not reflect well on the leader of a superpower claiming the moral mandate of Western civilisation. And what of the Americans? We know that foreign policy by assassination is an incomplete recipe for success. The larger lesson from these weeks in Syria emerges from Trump's treatment of a US ally. The coverline of Britain's Economist magazine last week read: "Who can trust Trump's America"? And the subtitle: "The consequences of betraying the Kurds." If any country can trust Trump's America, surely it is the most intimate US ally in the Middle East, Israel. Trump is just the latest in a line of US presidents, Republican and Democrat, to declare his undying love for the promised land. But even Israel is disturbed by Trump's breezy betrayal of the Kurds. "Donald Trump may love you," says the leading Israeli political commentator Ehud Yaari, "but at the end of the day he leaves you alone confronting Putin's Russia and with Iran creeping in." While Israel's political parties grope to form a governing coalition, "the main issue confronting Israel is the retreat of Donald Trump from the Middle East", he says. "The US will support Israel by selling equipment, and they will support it diplomatically, but look at what happened to the Kurds, and the spectacular Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities" to which the US signally failed to respond.

Loading "We will come to the point in the very foreseeable future that Israel will conclude that we'd better act now or otherwise we will wake up one day encircled by Iran," says Yaari. "We will not let them tighten the noose around our neck. "Trump is deeply averse to military intervention. Israel is on its own." If even Israel cannot count on US help in a fight, what chance does any other US ally have? Trump's America may defend its own most immediate and most obvious interests. But we are learning that Trump does not include American allies in that definition. Peter Hartcher is international editor.