It was always going to be a dangerous policy to claim that Islamic State was finished. The danger, though, did not stop a few global leaders recently from trumpeting the imminent demise in Syria and Iraq of the richest and most destructive Islamist militant organisation the world has seen.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said as much these past weeks at a Moscow Conference on International Security. At a recent press conference in Washington, US President Donald Trump said the US was “knocking the hell” out of IS but at least admitted there was still work to be done to defeat the jihadists.

Trump’s observation about work still needing to be done is, uncharacteristically, a real understatement. That much has been obvious in Iraq recently.

As a testament to IS’s resilience, the past weeks have seen a series of high-profile attacks, including one in which at least nine federal police officers were taken hostage at a fake checkpoint and then executed by IS fighters disguised as Shiite militiamen. There has also been a report that as many as 200 members of the Iraqi security forces have been killed in IS attacks over the past several months.

“IS’s proto-state no longer exists. Their flag doesn’t fly over Iraqi territory,” says Fareed Yasseen, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States. “But that doesn’t mean they’ve disappeared. They are reverting to old tactics used by al-Qaeda before 2014.”

Nearly three years on from IS’s high water mark in the summer of 2015, there is no denying that the jihadist group is not the force it once was in terms of the self-proclaimed caliphate.

But the remarks by Putin and Trump are almost certainly aimed at appeasing their domestic audience rather than illustrating the stark reality of the way IS has metamorphosed and presents a new threat in both Syria and especially Iraq.

Just last week around the time Trump was stressing the need to get out of Syria and saying ‘job done’ against IS, the jihadists had their own message.

In a communique posted on social media after a long silence, IS fighters reaffirmed their allegiance to the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the IS emir, who has not been heard from since November.

“To infuriate and terrorise the infidels, we renew our pledge of loyalty to the commander of the faithful and the caliph of the Muslims,” the communique said.

According to security expert Fadel Abu Reghif, some 95 per cent of IS’s leaders are still hiding in different areas inside and outside Iraq.

“The most prominent IS leaders are funding terrorist activities of the group from outside Iraq,” Abu Reghif said. “Nobody can ignore the fact that 95 per cent of IS leaders did not fight, but they preferred to escape and hide in different areas inside and outside Iraq."

At the height of its power more than 40,000 foreign fighters from at least 120 different countries flocked to Iraq and Syria to join IS, according to US intelligence. Now many are dead. The Soufan Centre, a security intelligence consultancy, estimates that at least 5,600 had returned to their home countries by the end of 2017. Experts now think only about 3000 foreign fighters remain in the remnants of the group’s proto-state. But this, of course, does not account for local fighters and their allies whose numbers are difficult to estimate.

Most IS fighters have fled to the desert, in line with the organisation’s shift toward hit-and-run attacks. In Syria, despite being kicked out of the main towns they once occupied near the Iraqi border, the jihadists have regrouped elsewhere and revised their tactics, recently mounting a brazen attack on a border city in eastern Syria and even expanding their footprint inside the Syrian capital Damascus itself.

While IS has lost almost all the territory it once controlled in Syria and Iraq, land that had encompassed a third of those countries, the pockets it still holds provide protection.

According to Jalal al-Hamad, a Europe-based Syrian activist who monitors the war with an organisation called Justice for Life, IS fighters have excellent knowledge of the desert areas along the Syria-Iraq border, dating back to the early days of the group and even before, when the group was called al-Qaeda in Iraq.

IS has extensive tunnels there and can move relatively undetected, avoiding Syrian and Russian airstrikes, al-Hamad says. Though American planes can detect them. The jihadists use bad weather, particularly dust storms, to cross the Euphrates, al-Hamad added.

This continued and persistent presence troubles some US military officials who feel that the Trump administration’s urgent desire to get out of Syria, would leave a job unfinished at a crucial juncture, allowing IS to once again become a major threat to stability in the region.

“The hard part, I think, is in front of us, and that is stabilising these areas, consolidating our gains, getting people back into their homes,” General Joseph L. Votel, who heads US Central Command operations, candidly said recently. “There is a military role in this, certainly in the stabilisation phase."

That Votel’s remarks coincided those given by Trump emphasising his desire to “get out” of Syria as quickly as possible, only underlines the frustration of many military officials who feel there is a real danger in departing prematurely from Syria giving IS the opportunity to revive.

Trump’s decision to freeze the paltry $200 million the US had pledged to help rebuild areas liberated from IS appears to ignore past mistakes made elsewhere in the world. Prosecuting the war is one thing but as history has shown it remains vital to invest in countries to help ensure instability does not prevail and insurgency reignites.

“We're on the two-yard line. We could literally fall into the end zone. We're that close to total victory, to wiping out the IS caliphate in Syria,” a US Special Forces officer in Syria told NBC News last week, underscoring the concerns that now is not the time for the US military to wind down its operations.

America’s allies among the Kurds and others fighting IS in Syria have also expressed what they called “concern on the street level.”

“Daesh is not over," said the commander of the US-backed Manbij Military Council, the joint Kurdish-Arab body administering this strategic northern Syrian town.

“Daesh still has cells present in all areas and every now and then there are problems in areas where the cells are still operating," said the commander, referring to IS by its Arabic acronym.

If concerns remain in Syria over IS's continued presence, then in Iraq they are arguably even more pronounced.

Nearly four months after Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared that IS had been militarily defeated, the group has rapidly transformed back into a terrorist network and shows no sign of ending its campaign of attacks across northern Iraq.

IS attacks against security forces and civilians, often involving fake checkpoints, have centred on the group’s former strongholds in Anbar and Kirkuk provinces, and near Mosul and in Diyala province.

“It’s a very inhospitable area,” says Col. Ryan Dillon, a spokesman for the US led coalition. “But it’s hospitable for people who want to hide out because of the rough terrain. IS has been able to dig tunnels and store weapons, ammo, and bomb-making material."

Perhaps nowhere in Iraq has the resurgence of IS been more noticeable than in the north east of the country. Respected Middle East correspondent Borzou Daragahi has detailed the emergence of a group of IS veterans there “readying itself to terrorise the country once more.”

Led by Hiwa Chor, a one-eyed militant in his early forties, they are known as the White Flags. Daragahi believes that Chor and the group chose the name perhaps in order to contrast with the black flag that symbolizes IS.

Whatever the motive for choosing their name, they are clearly intent on carrying out operations on IS’s behalf.

Armed with an arsenal built up over the years fighting alongside IS, Daragahi describes now the White Flags ride in four-wheel-drive pickup trucks through the Hamreen mountains, finding shelter from patrols, mortars, and airstrikes launched by Iraqi forces.

Equipped with night-vision goggles, they operate seven miles from the outskirts of the city of Tuz Khurmatu, along the main highway between Baghdad and the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, and use tunnels to move back and forth between nearby Kurdish and Arab areas.

“They move from place to place in the Hamreen mountains,” Daragahi quotes Ahmad Sharifi, a former Iraqi intelligence officer as saying.

“No one from our units can recognise the paths they take, because they know the geography. They know the caves.”

The White Flags are busy too it seems attempting to win the hearts and minds of those who might prove to be useful allies. While seeking to build goodwill among the farmers and shepherds in the sparsely populated terrain, they collect recruits and stock pile weapons.

“They tell them, ‘We are here to protect you. We are here to liberate you,’” Jamal Warani, a Kurdish peshmerga commander, told Daragahi.

Much of IS’s new strategy seems to focus on a combination of attempting to reassert tacit control over rural areas while simultaneously targeting key political and symbolic figures associated with the Iraqi state. Mike Knights, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said: “They’re dominating no man’s land outside of the towns and cities.”

The goal, Knights said, is to bottle up security forces, allowing IS increasingly greater freedom of movement throughout the countryside.

While clearly on it heels, IS by adapting its battlefield tactics and shifting its operational narrative is proving that it remains a wily and determined foe capable of inflicting grievous harm if given the chance, and of reconstituting itself if the underlying conditions that fuelled its rise are not addressed.

In its ambushes and assassinations it remains hell bent on continuing its jihad and to “terrorise the infidels”.

The simple inescapable truth is that in both Syria and Iraq IS is far from finished. Should the Trump administration and its Western allies insist on seeing it that way and lift the pressure now, they run the serious risk of allowing the jihadists the chance to once again achieve a bridgehead in the region. It’s not that there is a new IS threat, rather that the old one has simply never gone away.

ISLAMIC STATE: A POTTED HISTORY

Although IS has been in decline for years now, losing territory and fighters, one thing has remained constant, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, their reclusive leader and self-styled Caliph, remains at the helm, writes Scott Hope.

IS started as a regional terrorist group, called ISI or Islamic State in Iraq, associated with al-Qaeda. They eventually diverged after trying to absorb al-Qaeda backed groups in Syria in 2013, this put the ISI in direct conflict with al-Qaeda after the power grab was rebuked. Coming out on top and rebranding as ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, they consolidated power and took control of vast swathes of territory.

Al-Baghdadi has lead the group throughout their rise and fall. IS haS reportedly lost 98% of their territory as of November 2017. Their major cities, Mosul and Raqqa have been recaptured, dealing a severe blow to IS and its leadership. Baghdadi is frequently, falsely, reported dead, but on several recent occasions has come dangerously close to capture by spies in the region after recklessly trying to communicate with his scattered followers.

Baghdadi is one of only a few members of the upper echelons of IS leadership to survive. The US are offering a reward of up to $25m for any information which leads to his capture.

IS is widely considered to have had tens of thousands of fighters at the height of their power in 2015. After losing most of their territory the number of fighters plummeted and the more pressing issue today for the west has become how to deal with returning fighters who travelled to the region to join the caliphate. Over 400 Britons who had travelled to IS territory are said to be returning, according to a recent study by the Soufan Center and the Global Strategy Network.