On Feb. 4, 1920, Royal Air Force planes struck the fortified wells and stone forts of Taleh, decisively ending Mohammed Abdullah Hassan’s twenty-year Dervish resistance in British Somaliland. By deploying obsolete bombers alongside a small local levy, Britain accomplished what successive ground columns had repeatedly failed to achieve against a highly resilient jihadi movement. This historical victory offers a stark, enduring lesson for modern strategists.

Today, Washington risks falling into the exact same trap of prolonged distraction. While the Trump administration concentrates almost exclusively on Iranian missile inventories and Russian maneuvers in Ukraine, the Islamic State is quietly rebuilding its infrastructure. The group still fields up to 3,000 fighters inside Syria and continues to treat Yemen as a protected media sanctuary. Far more dangerously, however, ISIS has shifted the bulk of its combat power and recruitment into Africa, where its affiliates now generate the vast majority of its globally claimed attacks. These residual Syrian cadres and Yemeni media nodes preserve the technical and propaganda capacity that African provinces stand ready to exploit as soon as local pressure declines.