News that the US is sending 560 more troops to Iraq as part of the push to recapture the northern city of Mosul from Isis is being seen as further evidence the jihadis are on the run. Surveys that show Isis has lost 12 per cent of its self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq so far this year, after a shrinkage of 14 per cent in 2015, feed into this narrative. So, too, in its grim way, does the spate of terror attacks with which Isis has marked Ramadan, from Baghdad to Bangladesh, and Medina to Istanbul.

Some interpret this proliferation of atrocity – the attacks at a Shia market in Baghdad that killed almost 300 and at Istanbul’s Ataturk international airport, where 45 died, were especially savage – as an index of jihadi failure as Isis territory contracts.

This seems overly reductive. Isis has always launched far-flung attacks and switched between, as well as combined, regular and irregular warfare. If they held more territory, and their momentum had not been arrested, there might actually be more such attacks.