The Remnant / Real Life

• The Sicarii were Jewish rebels who survived the Roman suppression of the Jewish Revolts for several years and occupied the fortress of Masada. They were eventually besieged by the Romans and committed mass suicide to avoid capture.
• When the Western Roman Empire fell in AD 476, it was survived by a number of remnant states that continued to call themselves the "Roman Empire" or sought to reestablish it to its former glory:
  • The largest and most successful Remnant was the Byzantine Empire, consisting of the eastern provinces of Greece, Anatolia (Turkey), Syria, and Egypt. It lasted for a thousand years, its rulers loftily styling themselves "Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans". The Byzantine Empire in turn started its own remnants after the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade in 1204; one of them, the Empire of Nicaea, later recaptured Constantinople and put its emperor on the throne there, while the longest-lived, the Empire of Trebizond, maintained independence until 1461, eight years after Constantinople fell to the Turks.
  • Julius Nepos, ruler of the province of Dalmatia in the Balkans and the last Western Emperor recognized by the east, continued to style himself "Emperor" until his death in AD 480.
  • The warlord Aegidius, and later his son Syagarius, continued to hold out against barbarian incursions in the city of Soissons in northern Gaul (France). It lasted until King Clovis I of the Franks conquered their lands and added them to his own petty kingdom in 486. Clovis' consolidation of power and territory would lay the foundations of the medieval French monarchy.
  • It's widely speculated that the historical basis for King Arthur^note he's likely a Composite Character of several warlords, most likely Ambrosius Aurelianus and Riothamus among others ruled over the last vestiges of Roman influence in Britannia that weren't subsumed by the Anglo-Saxons. When the Anglo-Saxons pushed further west, the Romano-British would retreat to the region known as Wales. As Wales remained independent until the Normans invaded and was not fully annexed to England until 1283, this technically makes it the last remnant of the Western Roman Empire. Evidence is etymological; the Welsh refer to the region as "Cymru" in their own Celtic language, whereas "Welsh" is itself derived from a German term not for Celts, but for Romans.
• Meibion Glyndwr is an odd sort of Remnant. It's a Welsh independence movement most active in the 1960s and 1970s which did things like vandalise English-only signs in Wales and threaten to firebomb English vacation homes there. Although it looks like a particularly ineffectual Welsh version of the IRA, its name translates to "Sons of Glyndwr", and accordingly it traces itself to the army of prince Owain Glyndwr, who led an attempt to retake Wales from English dominance in the 15th century. As Wales was last an independent kingdom in the late 1100s, that would qualify it for one of the longest-lasting Remnants around. However, given the British government's concessions of Welsh autonomy and acknowledgement of its language and culture, very few people take Meibion Glyndwr very seriously anymore.
• The town of Calais in northern France was a Remnant of English rule over France; even after Joan of Arc and her friends booted the English out of the rest of France, England held on to Calais. This gave Calais a reputation as an odd Remnant, exacerbated during the Wars of the Roses, when its position in France made it hard to conquer and it was essentially the Remnant for whichever faction was out of power at the time. Calais would continue being an English possession until the reign of Queen Mary I. Similarly, the Channel Islands were something of a Remnant insofar as they were culturally closer to France than England and came into English possession through William the Conqueror; to this day, the British monarch rules over the Channel Islands as the Duke of Normandy^note not "duchess", even if the monarch is female like Elizabeth II, as William the Conqueror did thousands of years before.
• The Kingdom of Navarre existed in this way up until the 19th century. It was one of the several medieval kingdoms in the Iberian peninsula, almost all of which were conquered and assimilated into modern Spain. Navarre was one of the last holdouts; while it was basically assimilated in 1492 and almost fully conquered in 1512, a tiny portion of it persisted north of the Pyrenees, where the former monarchs of Navarre remained as a kind of government in exile. Then, in 1589, King Henry of Navarre succeeded to the French throne and styled himself "King of France and Navarre". Every subsequent French monarch (except Napoleon) would do so until 1830, even though the overwhelming majority of what had been Navarre had long been a part of Spain.
• The Principality of Liechtenstein has been described as the last functioning remnant of the Holy Roman Empire, having survived both Napoléon Bonaparte's dissolution of said Empire and the later collapse of Austria-Hungary in World War I.
• Both Taiwan and Mongolia have been home to various remnants of Chinese dynasties at different times.
  • The khans of the House of Genghis Khan were displaced by the Ming in China itself but still ruled Mongolia and claimed to be the legitimate rulers of all China as the Yuan Dynasty. In the end, both the Ming and Yuan dynasties became remnants when they were absorbed by the Qing Dynasty, who came from Manchuria.
  • In Taiwan, Zheng Chenggong, a one-time pirate known to the Europeans as Koxinga, set up a de facto independent state called the Kingdom of Tungning after the fall of the Ming Dynasty. Zheng was more than "Chiang Kai-shek before his time"; his kingdom displaced both the Dutch outpost on Taiwan and the indigenous peoples of the island, becoming the first major Han Chinese settlement there. His kingdom lasted a full generation before being conquered by Qing imperial troops in 1683. Zheng remains a major folk hero in Taiwan.
• The "Old Believers" are an unusual religious Remnant. They broke away from the mainstream Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-17th century over a number of liturgical and doctrinal changes, most infamously changing the sign of the cross from using two fingers to three. The Old Believers still exist today and a fair number of them live apart from society; bizarrely, the mainstream Russian Orthodox Church is technically closer to Christianity as it was practiced in the Byzantine days, as the traditions the Old Believers held on to were generally idiosyncracies added by centuries of practice in Russia.
• The Jacobites, the followers of the British King James II, became a remnant after his ouster in 1688. They attempted two rebellions to restore the House of Stuart to the throne; the first in 1715 was pretty much abortive, but the second in 1745 was almost successful.
• The Vendée rebellion against the French Revolution was a relatively unexpected attack by the Remnant of the prior regime. It arose in provincial France, where the population makeup was very different from Paris where the Revolution started; the local church hierarchy and peasantry fit very poorly into the Revolution's societal framework. In many ways, it was the Trope Codifier; the rebellion was not centrally organized by higher-ups in the former regime, but started organically by locals who weren't ready for the transition. The rebels were extremely persistent and kept bothering the new government until it was violently and decisively put down in 1796.
• When The Netherlands fell during The Napoleonic Wars, the only place left where the Dutch flag flew turned out to be the trading outpost of Dejima, an artificial island in the harbour of Nagasaki in Tokugawa-era Japan. That was a bit too far for Napoleon's taste.
• The War of 1812 formally ended in December 1814, but battles were fought for a few months after that (if only because information travelled so slowly back then). Among them was the Battle of New Orleans, in which the Americans won a decisive victory and convinced the British not to renege on the treaty they had signed; it also made a household name of Major General Andrew Jackson, who would later be elected President.
• Following the Mexican-American War, there were groups of soldiers on both sides referred to as "filibusters" that refused to acknowledge that the war was over and performed raids on the opposing country as well as on Native American tribes unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire. Unlike most examples, the American side mostly just used the war as an excuse for War for Fun and Profit considering they had already won.
• After the American Civil War, Confederate general Robert E. Lee refused to go down this path, even though several of his subordinates believed otherwise. Lee felt that continued fighting would reduce the Southern forces to isolated guerrillas and bandits, prolonging the war and bloodshed but accomplishing little. Nevertheless, a few groups decided to ignore Lee's decision to surrender:
  • This is how Jesse James and his gang got their start. They were Southern guerrilla fighters during the war who continued their battle even after the war ended. They quickly built a reputation as anti-Reconstruction Folk Heroes, with James in particular seeking revenge on the Northerners who had appropriated his family's land.
  • The last ship to fly the Confederate flag was the commerce raider CSS Shenandoah. It kept hanging around a few months after the war ended, occasionally conducting raids on "enemy" shipping runs and choosing to ignore any news that leaked out about Lee's surrender. It wasn't until November 1865, about five months after the surrender, that it reached port (in England, to avoid accusations of piracy) and officially struck its colors.
  • The "Confederados" were a group of Southerners who fled to Brazil after the war. The Brazilian Empire had offered Southerners subsidized transport to Brazil, cheap land, and tax breaks, in exchange for lending their expertise in cultivating cotton. A few of them had hoped to continue building the Southern cause from there, but most simply thought life would be better in Brazil than in the South, now mostly destroyed and dominated by the Yankees. Their descendants still live in the area and maintain some of the traditions of the Antebellum South. When then-Governor Jimmy Carter visited the community in the early 70s, he was stunned to find a recreation of the pastoral South he knew and loved.
  • The Ku Klux Klan and similar entities were formed in part for this purpose. The rise of the Klan is associated with the "Lost Cause of the South", a highly romanticized idea of Southern culture and independence. The Klan quickly turned to violence and chose to direct it towards the most visible symbol of the North's victory, emancipated negroes (who, conveniently for them, were much less able to return fire than enemy soldiers).
• The "Bitter-Enders" were a group of holdouts from The Second Boer War who refused to surrender to the British and kept fighting as a set of guerrilla groups roaming the South African countryside.
• The Spanish garrison in Baler in the Philippines bunkered in the local church when it was beseiged by Filipino forces. They held out until June 1899, and in the process completely missed the Spanish-American War.
• During the Russian Civil War, several White warlords in the Russian Far East kept fighting months or even years after the last White forces were destroyed in 1920, even in further-flung reaches of the Empire like Crimea and Siberia. The lead Determinator was General Anatoly Pepelyaev, who led a raid on several towns in Yakutia in 1923, even after the other remnants in the region had already fallen. Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg also conducted raids in the Soviet Union and Mongolia until his own men handed him over to the Bolsheviks. And some anti-Bolshevik holdouts emerged from hiding or returned from exile to join the Nazis in the fight against the Communists. (It didn't end well for them.)
• Belarus broke away from the Russian Empire during the Russian Civil War and established the "Belarusian People's Republic", which lasted until 1919 when the Bolsheviks invaded and ousted them. They then established a Government in Exile called the "Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic", which has been running for more than a century, lately being based in Canada. Belarus itself became a Remnant of its own of sorts, having attained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 but being run in very Soviet-like fashion by strongman president Alexander Lukashenko and commonly being seen as a Russian puppet. When Lukashenko won a highly disputed election in 2020, protesters against him flew the Rada's flag, and the Rada itself broke longstanding tradition and accepted Lukashenko's opponent as its own legitimately elected leader.
• Hermann Detzner was a German engineer who was a holdout in World War I in the former German colony in New Guinea. He eventually surrendered to Australian forces there in January 1919, two months after Germany signed the Armistice of Compiègne, and four months after Australia conquered the German colonial capital in New Guinea. Detzner claimed to have been the last soldier of the German Empire, flying German colours and singing German hymns for the duration of the war; the Australians thought him so harmless that they claimed to have known his whereabouts the entire time and were just waiting for him to surrender.
• After the Ottoman Empire fell apart after World War I:
  • Ottoman Lieutenant General Fakhri Pasha, beseiged at Medina by Arab forces, rejected the Armistice of Mudros and disobeyed his superiors' orders to surrender. After holding out for two months, he was arrested by his own troops and handed over to the Entente in January 1919. He was kept as a prisoner for two years and then released, immediately joining Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's forces in the Turkish War of Independence.
  • Enver Pasha, one of the Triumvirate of "Young Turks" that ruled the Ottoman Empire during World War I, turned up in Central Asia in 1922 organising the Turkic Muslim tribes there, hoping to recreate the Ottoman Empire from scratch — even as the Soviet Union was in control of the region. It didn't work out.
  • During World War II, Imperial Japan of all people located the rightful heir to the throne, Prince Şehzade Mehmed Abdülkerim, and invited him to Tokyo with the intent of using the Turkic Uyghur minority in China to revive the empire with Abdülkerim as a Puppet King right next to Manchuria and Mengjiang, creating a buffer state against the USSR they could use to further their invasion of China. However, the Soviets noticed what they were trying to do and had their puppet ruler of Xinjiang, Sheng Shicai, steamroll their weak forces before they could become a threat. Abdülkerim then fled to India before seeking asylum in the US and being found dead mysteriously in a New York hotel.
• Even after Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans' various remnants kept trying to fight him for decades, even until the day he died.
• The Japanese holdouts were soldiers who fought for Imperial Japan in World War II and kept fighting after the war ended — sometimes decades later. They were usually stationed on small islands in the Philippines or elsewhere in the Pacific and either never learned or never believed that Japan had actually surrendered. The last known holdout was Teruo Nakamura, who didn't surrender until 1974, a full 29 years after the war's end — but rumours of even more persisted until the end of the century. These single soldiers survived through guerrilla tactics, stealing food and supplies from the locals and attacking local law enforcement; however, due to the unusual circumstances of their actions, most were absolved of all charges after being recovered.
  • Hiroo Onoda was the second-to-last holdout, having been recovered only a few months before Nakamura in 1974. They found him a few months before that, but he refused to believe anyone that the war was over. The only way to get him to surrender was to fly in his long-retired former commanding officer to tell him personally to stand down. When he surrendered, he still had his army sword and original-issue rifle in full working order. During the last two years of his holdout (three men with him all turned themselves in or died between 1950 and 1972), Onoda acted as a lone guerrilla. He and his companions raided and burned the property and crops of local Filipino villagers, killed an estimated 30 people and wounded 100 more; Ferdinand Marcos later granted him a pardon on live TV.
  • Shoichi Yokoi, a holdout on the island of Guam, first heard that the war was over in 1952, but held out for another twenty years after that. He was stunned that the locals who discovered and subdued him didn't kill him as one might expect during the war. When he returned to Japan, his official statement was, "I am embarrassed that I have returned alive," a phrase that quickly became popular in Japan.
  • The aforementioned Teruo Nakamura was the last Japanese holdout to be discovered. He was a member of the Takasago Volunteers Unit composed of Taiwanese aborigines. A search team led by a JSDF Major-General lured him out of hiding by singing the Japanese National Anthem. During his debrief, on being informed that the Pacific War was over, Nakamura calmly replied, "Japan did not lose the war; I wish to return to Japan." But instead, without his knowledge, he was flown back to Taiwan under the assumed Chinese name "Lee Kuang-Hui". In 2012, they erected a bronze statue in his honor in, of all places, Indonesia (perhaps out of a perception there that Japan aided Indonesia in its independence, with many ex-Imperial soldiers fighting on behalf of the revolution).
• Nazi Germany never did this officially. Indeed, Adolf Hitler was pretty damn self-centered and a hardcore social Darwinist; he felt that if his forces were defeated, it was the German people's fault and they didn't deserve to be called the "master race" anyway.^note If you watch the scene from Downfall that inspired the Hitler Rants — with the real subtitles, of course — this is part of what Hitler is ranting about. And that happened in real life. Therefore, he never made provisions for a Nazi remnant, preferring a Salt the Earth approach. But when he died, the remaining Nazis didn't really agree with him:
  • The Werwolf project is the by-word for "Nazi holdout faction". It was originally devised as an underground network of soldiers that would conduct sabotage and guerrilla warfare in parts of Germany that hadn't yet been (but soon would be) occupied by Allied forces. It was never seriously intended as a last-ditch effort to retain Nazi control of Germany. However, the Allies didn't know that, leading to intense paranoia about Nazi remnants hitting when they least expect it; the project's propaganda value far outweighed its practical use, leading the Allies to overestimate the threat it posed. Indeed, this is a big reason why the Soviets were the first to Berlin; Eisenhower was too busy worrying about potential remnants in Bavaria. And this paranoia persisted in U.S. foreign policy for decades after the war; for instance, members of George W. Bush's administration cited Werwolf as a reason to continue the Iraq War even after the deposition of Saddam Hussein.^note That basically became a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy; as long as the U.S.-led coalition forces were still in Iraq, the Ba'ath holdouts had a target and a reason to keep fighting.
  • "Nazi" groups of this kind existed in countries outside Germany, as well. Many of them were in Eastern Europe and weren't really big on Nazi ideology, but really hated the Communists. They survived the war in anti-Communist underground movements, many of which fought for more than a decade after the war ended; for instance, the last Polish group of freedom fighters was captured in 1965. The longest-lasting of these were in the Baltic states, where these fighters became the "Forest Brethren" and moved into the woods to keep fighting; while it was extremely dangerous for them when Joseph Stalin was in charge, they kept holding out even after the Soviets started offering pardons. The last fighters in Latvia were captured in 1957; in Lithuania, they lasted until 1971; and in Estonia, they lasted until 1979. The degree to which these anti-Communist groups espoused Nazi ideology varies considerably and is indeed a matter of extreme controversy where these groups are celebrated in the modern day.
  • Modern-day neo-Nazis are something of an interesting case. While the common stereotype of them is the skinhead who has no interest in administration of government, there are a few who seek to prolong Hitler's cause. Some act as paramilitaries (or more accurately terrorists), while others attempt to establish successors to the Nazi Party (despite this being illegal in Germany and much of Europe these days). Few of them seem to understand very much about Hitler's policy, many of them choosing to deny that the Holocaust even happened (when one would expect them to acknowledge that it did happen and claim it was the right decision). Quite a few aren't even German and just seem interested in putting a Nazi spin on their own country's political bugbears, leading to cosplaying in horribly outdated Sturmabteilung uniforms and elevating Hitler to an almost immortal being.
• The Chinese Civil War led to a lot of remnants:
  • Taiwan is easily the most famous remnant of the war, because it still exists in that state. The Republic of China, having lost the war in 1949, decamped to Taiwan hoping to use it as a base to retake the mainland. Accordingly, Chiang Kai-shek ran it as a military dictatorship and invested little in infrastructure, expecting not to stay there very long. Meanwhile, the vagaries of the Cold War meant that several countries considered the People's Republic of China an invading force and continued to recognize only the ROC as the legitimate government of China — but that changed in 1971, when the U.S. switched its recognition in exchange for trade ties with the PRC, and most nations have followed suit since then. This did not deter Chiang, who continued to harbor ambitions to retake the mainland; martial law was only lifted in 1987. Today, China rests in an awkward status quo; both the ROC and PRC claim control of all of China, including Taiwan, but consider only themselves to be the legitimate government.^note Interestingly, the ROC's claimed borders are more expansive than the PRC's; it includes parts of Mongolia, Burma, and Tajikistan. Although the ROC has officially acquiesced on its claim to all of Mongolia, it's still considered a remarkably expansionist ambition, one more reminiscent of the Qing Empire than of a modern-day democracy. Because of this, other countries can only recognize the PRC or ROC, not both. While there are many Taiwanese who have given up on ambitions of reconquest and angle for Taiwan's independence (which neither the PRC nor the Kuomintang will accept), there exist many hardcore KMT followers, in Taiwan and elsewhere around the world, who still dream of the ROC regaining control of all of China.
  • A group of pro-Chiang guerrillas persisted in Burma in the 1950s. They were sponsored by the CIA and raised funds by smuggling heroin and opium into the country. (You'd think after all those Opium Wars that the West would have known better.) They persisted until 1961, when a joint Sino-Burmese force drove them into Laos; from there, some retreated to Taiwan, while others escaped to Thailand or stayed in Laos and started families there. The ones in Laos returned to the drug trade, at this point barely under the control of the KMT, being little more than common drug dealers; they wound up in a three-way conflict over 16 tons of opium with the local drug warlords and a rogue CIA-backed Laoting general.
  • In Yunnan and Northwest China, Muslim Chinese loyal to the Kuomintang and led by the Ma clique warlords led a prologned guerrilla campaign against the PRC. It lasted until its leaders were captured and executed in 1958.
  • Tibet's remnants formed a Government in Exile in neighboring India after the region was invaded by the PRC in 1950. It was semi-autonomous in the ROC days; although the ROC claimed Tibet's territory and the Tibetans had frequent clashes with Ma's KMT-aligned soldiers from neighboring Xinjiang, it more or less ran its own affairs until Mao came calling.
• The OAS was a French remnant in Algeria, itself a last vestige of The French Colonial Empire. It consisted mostly of the pieds-noirs, as French settlers in Algeria and their descendants were known; many were also disgruntled military leaders and far-right extremists. They were extraordinarily pissed at Charles de Gaulle's negotiations with Algerian rebel fighters and eventual acquiescence of Algeria's independence. Unable to seriously disrupt the peace process through paramilitary attacks on Algerians, they soon began targeting French officials and ultimately de Gaulle himself.
• In 1969, when the "Football War" broke out between El Salvador and Honduras, one man fled to the jungle to act as a guerrilla fighter. He finally "surrendered" more than thirty years later, to a group of lumberjacks he mistook for enemy soldiers, telling them that he was tired of running away. The saddest part is that the actual war lasted four days.
• From The Vietnam War and subsequent conflicts:
  • The South Vietnamese government officially ceded power to the North Vietnamese in 1975, and the country was considered unified that year. But many South Vietnamese fled abroad, the majority to America, and continue to advocate for the restoration of the former Republic of Vietnam as the only legitimate government of the country. They're recognizable by their frequent display of the cờ ba que or "three sticks flag" of South Vietnam. A few of them wandered back into the jungle in Laos and Cambodia to try to launch guerrilla attacks into Vietnam, but with little impact. There's also a bit of a stereotype that these guys are so anti-Communist that they're hard right-wing, a stereotype bolstered by the presence of the "three sticks flag" at the 2021 Capitol Riot in Washington.
  • During the war, various insurgent groups sprang up comprised of remote ethnic minorities, most notably the Montagnards and the Hmong. They sided with the Americans and South Vietnamese but continued fighting even after the Americans pulled out and the Communists took over the country, with some forces continuing to hold out into the 1990s. Tragically, Communist authorities in Laos and Vietnam responded with campaigns of collective punishment against the Hmong and Montagnards, which sometimes reached genocidal proportions.
  • In Cambodia, remnants of Pol Pot's infamous Khmer Rouge regime held out for twenty years. They were ousted in 1979 by their former Communist allies in Vietnam, but a large portion of their forces fled to Thailand, regrouped, and launched an insurgency against Cambodia's new Vietnamese-backed government. They fought as part of a broader rebel coalition that included anti-Communist and monarchist groups. In the early 1990s, the latter groups signed a peace agreement, but the Khmer Rouge continued fighting until its final collapse in 1999, one year after Pol Pot's death.
• The aftermath of the Iranian Revolution led to a number of groups seeking to overthrow the Islamic Republic and restore a prior regime in Iran. Problem is they can't agree on which prior regime, leading to several different Remnants who all want to establish their own regime. The most prominent, the National Council of Iran, seeks to reinstall the Shah, with the son of the ousted Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi very much active in that respect. A few remnants angle for a democratic republic like that of Mohammed Mossadegh, who was himself overthrown by the Shah's regime (with CIA help). The most controversial is the leftist People's Mujahideen of Iran; the U.S. government (well aware of its role in the Iranian Revolution) officially declared it a terrorist organization for its more violent approach, but every now and then you'll find U.S. politicians getting caught donating to them.
• After the fall of the Soviet Union, a few places weren't too keen on being part of a "new" country. Belarus has been accused of this the most, what with its very Soviet-like dictatorship and State Sec setup; the new Central Asian republics also had a lot of continuity with the Soviet era, in many cases retaining their leaders from back then. Perhaps the weirdest is Transnistria, a Russian-majority unrecognised breakaway state in Moldova that still uses many symbolic trappings of the Soviet Union like the famous hammer and sickle.
• An unwilling example was András Toma, the last prisoner of war of World War II. He was a Hungarian soldier who was captured by Russians in 1945, and was transferred to a hospital after he fell ill. None of the doctors knew Hungarian and thought he was speaking gibberish, so he was Wrongfully Committed. As Russians aren't exactly known for being champions of mental health, he was kept in isolation for 53 years until he was discovered by a linguist in 2000. As he was technically never discharged, the Hungarian Minister of Defense promoted him to Sergeant Major and gave him the decades of back pay he had accumulated.
• Another unwilling example was Sergei Krikalev & Aleksandr Volkov, the last Soviet citizens. The duo were Russian cosmonauts who began a mission onboard the Mir space station in May 1991, only for the dissolution of the Soviet Union to occur in December of that year. As the empire who sent them into space no longer existed and the spaceport that sent them up was now in the newly independent Kazakhstan, they were stranded for almost a full year before being rescued in March 1992.
• The Iraq War led to the term "blowback" being more widely known in U.S. political parlance for precisely this reason. U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein soon after the war started in 2003 — only for the fighting to continue as various groups resisted what they saw as U.S. occupation. The Americans presumed that all such groups were remnants of Saddam's Ba'ath Party, and while many were, this didn't apply to all of them; the befuddled Americans dubbed them "dead-enders", wondering why they were still fighting after Saddam was overthrown. They evidently didn't realize that they were the enemy and not Saddam. The Ba'athists, meanwhile, joined forces with many of these other insurgents, which helped give rise to Al-Qaeda and later ISIS in the region.
• After ISIS lost its last territorial holdings in Iraq and Syria, many diehards continued fighting as insurgents. Although they were a shadow of ISIS's "caliphate" at its height (and nobody recognised ISIS as a state anyway), they were significant enough to pose a serious security threat to local authorities.
• After decisively losing the First Libyan Civil War in 2011, some forces loyal to ousted dictator Muammar Gaddafi continued fighting. They lacked any significant popular support, were generally disorganized and isolated, and proved to be only a minor faction in the Second Libyan Civil War that began in 2014.
• Following the fall of Kabul in 2021, various groups loyal to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan continue to fight the Taliban until this very day.