Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani on Tuesday addressed the nation and announced the end of Daesh’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria. 

In a speech on national TV, Rouhani said: “Today with God’s guidance and the resistance of people in the region we can say that this evil has either been lifted from the head of the people or has been reduced.” 

“Of course the remnants will continue but the foundation and roots have been destroyed,” he said. 

This comes after a senior commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Major General Qassem Soleimani, declared the end of Daesh in a message to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, Reuters reported quoting Sepah News. 

Reuters reported that the Syrian conflict has entered a new phase with the capture at the weekend by government forces and their allies of Albu Kamal, the last significant town in Syria held by Daesh. 

Iraqi forces captured the border town of Rawa, the last remaining town there under Daesh control, on Friday, signaling the collapse of the so-called caliphate it proclaimed in 2014 across vast swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territory.

However, most of the forces battling Daesh in Syria and Iraq have said they expect the group to go underground and turn to a guerrilla insurgency using sleeper cells and bombings.

But in his address on Tuesday, Rouhani accused the United States and Israel of supporting Daesh and criticized Arab powers in the region for not speaking out about civilian deaths in Yemen’s conflict, Reuters reported.

However, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states in turn criticized Iran and its Lebanese Shi‘ite ally Hezbollah at an emergency meeting in Cairo on Sunday, calling for a united front to counter Iranian interference.

Meanwhile, Soleimani acknowledged the multinational force Iran has helped organize in the fight against Daesh and thanked the “thousands of martyrs and wounded Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Afghan and Pakistani defenders of the shrine”.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the country’s most powerful military force, has been fighting in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the central government in Baghdad for several years.

More than one thousand members of the Guards, including senior commanders, have been killed in Syria and Iraq in this time.

Figures given by different organizations put the death toll in Iraq since 2003, at between 600,000 and 1.2 million people, while the Syrian death toll since 2011 is over 500,000 people.