فَجَعَلَهُمْ كَعَصْفٍ مَّأْكُولٍۭ
Faja 'alahum ka'asfim m'akool
He made them [like] cropped stubble.
and left them like chewed-up straw.
The surah ends by reducing an imperial expedition to farm waste: 'aṣf is the husk and stalk left once the grain is taken, and ma'kūl adds that it has already been chewed over. Everything hangs on a single question put to an audience that could still remember the event. Some early commentators read this surah and the one after it as a single passage, with Quraysh's security in trade following directly from what happened here.