As Islamic State's caliphate withers, the fate of its foreign-born members looms over European nations

AMMAN, Jordan - Islamic State's self-styled caliphate once spanned territory larger than South Carolina. The extremist group controlled the lives of more than 8 million Iraqi and Syrian residents and established its own currency, a taxation system and a sprawling bureaucracy that went so far as to dictate what its subjects were allowed to wear and to think. Its fighters vowed they would conquer Rome, Paris and Washington.

Four years and a bloody military campaign later, all that remains of Islamic State's real estate holdings is a fraction of a square mile in a remote Syrian hamlet near the border with Iraq.

There, hundreds of the remaining militants and more