BAGHDAD — Multiple ground assaults and a deluge of air strikes shrank the Daesh terror group’s “caliphate” to a rump and decimated its fighters in 2016 but the organisation remains a potent threat.

The extremists have squandered close to half of the land they controlled in 2014 and many of their losses came this year, which saw major operations by myriad forces and countries.

The loss of symbolic bastions such as Fallujah in Iraq or Dabiq in Syria dented Daesh’s aura, revealing it could not defend places it once vowed were impregnable and central to its own mythology.

The extremists were driven out of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s vast western province of Anbar, as well as Manbij in Syria — strategic areas crucial to the caliphate’s territorial continuity.

Earlier this month, they also lost Sirte, their last major bastion in Libya, a country the extremists had hoped could drive the expansion of the “caliphate”.

In October, tens of thousands of Iraqi forces backed by air strikes from a US-led coalition launched a massive operation to retake Mosul, the city where Daesh supremo Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi proclaimed his “state” in June 2014.

The going has been tough for the security forces in the booby-trapped and sniper-infested streets of Iraq’s second city but there is little doubt the vastly outnumbered extremists will eventually lose their stronghold.