Accounts then quickly diverged over just who was responsible for the terrorist rampage. The Islamic State claimed credit for its first-ever attack in Iran. Soon after the attacks, ISIS released a twenty-four-second video through its Amaq news agency, which showed a rifle-toting gunman in parliament, standing over a bloodied body. The attacker invoked terms used in ISIS propaganda about the group’s ability to survive in the Middle East even as it loses its caliphate in neighboring Iraq and Syria.

Ten hours after Salman Abedi blew himself up outside the Manchester Arena, where the American pop star Ariana Grande was performing, ISIS claimed a grisly attack that killed twenty-two people and injured dozens more. “With Allah’s grace and support, a soldier of the Khilafah (caliphate) managed to place explosive devices in the midst of the gatherings of the Crusaders in the British city of Manchester,” the group boasted on social messaging apps, in multiple languages. The odd thing—for a group that has usually been judicious about its claims and accurate in its facts—is that it got key details wrong.

The world’s most volatile region faces a challenge that doesn’t involve guns, militias, warlords, or bloodshed, yet is also destroying societies. The Middle East, though energy-rich, no longer has enough electricity. From Beirut to Baghdad, tens of millions of people now suffer daily outages, with a crippling impact on businesses, schools, health care, and other basic services, including running water and sewerage. Little works without electricity.

Since the bloodless coup, in 1970, that brought the family to power, the Assad dynasty—the founding father, Hafez, and his heir and second son, Bashar—has exasperated nine American Presidents. “Time-consuming, nerve-racking, and bizarre,” Kissinger said of his sessions with Hafez al-Assad. Republican and Democratic Administrations alike have coaxed and cajoled, prodded and praised, and, most recently, confronted and condemned the Assads to induce policy changes.

The rampage in Berlin on Monday—which the German government has now deemed a terrorist attack, though the motive behind the attack was still murky—was right out of the jihadi literature. Around 8 p.m., a black semi-trailer jumped the curb and barrelled at forty miles an hour into an outdoor Christmas market. 

"This is one of the worst humanitarian crises since World War II," said Robin Wright, joint fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace. She said about half a million people have died in this conflict so far. The Middle East ...

The fall of Aleppo is the biggest victory for Assad in the grisly six-year war, which has killed more than four hundred thousand people and left more than half of Syria’s population, originally twenty-two million, dependent on international aid for daily survival. 

The Islamic State is now fighting to hang on to its two most valuable properties. On October 17th, Iraqi forces launched the long-awaited offensive to liberate Mosul, the largest city under Islamic State control, with two million residents. On November 6th, rebels in the Syrian Democratic Forces launched Euphrates Rage, an operation to free Raqqa, a city of some two hundred thousand.