How to defeat a caliphate

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[/audioplayer]Last Sunday Isis raised their black flag over Palmyra. Below the flag, in the days that followed, the usual carnage began: beheadings, torture, desecration. Syrian state TV has reported that over 400 civilians have been killed already, and the big question globally has become: how could this have happened? What went wrong with the Iraqi and Syrian troops? Isn’t there anything the West can do?

Lord Dannatt, the former head of the army, has called on the British government to ‘think the previously unthinkable’ and send troops. He’s right that air strikes are no substitute for decent ground troops — but he must also know there’s no appetite here or in America for risking our boys’ lives.

Perhaps, though, there’s another way of getting well-trained boots on the ground. If we want answers about how to squash Isis, we should look to another field of combat, 5,000 miles away from Palmyra — to a war has been all but won against equally determined Islamists.

After five grim months as part of Boko Haram’s self-declared ‘caliphate’, life is slowly returning to normal to the Nigerian town of Michika. Residents who fled in droves are trickling back to plant crops before the rains, and despite the desecrated churches and tales of neighbours kidnapped and murdered, there is optimism.

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Also looking cheerful for the first time are local army units, who unlike the Iraqi army, have found unexpected success in pushing Boko Haram from Michika and other north-east Nigerian towns. They weren’t always this upbeat. This was the same military that failed to stop 276 schoolgirls being kidnapped from the nearby village of Chibok last year, and who fled when Boko Haram first rolled into Michika in the autumn.