Kobane isn't hugely important in strategic terms. And that bodes poorly for the group's long-term prospects.īy the end of January, ISIS had been driven out of Kobane, a Kurdish town in northern Syria that it had spent enormous amounts of manpower and resources trying to seize. Still, ISIS's months of progress in Syria have stalled. No faction in Syria is in a position to challenge ISIS's core holdings, at least in the near term. ISIS has a firm hold on the Syrian city Raqqa and its environs it's stronger there than it is anywhere in Iraq. "They just don't have the ability, the wherewithal in Iraq to set up Sharia courts, patrol, and really govern a state." ISIS is at a standstill in Syria They're basically operating as an insurgency/mafia," he says. "The outcome in Iraq is now clear to most serious analysts." will lose its battle to hold territory in Iraq," Ollivant writes in War on the Rocks. And Iraq watchers are starting to see ISIS's struggles as harbingers of a larger collapse. Still, ISIS is falling back in most places where it's facing a serious push. The Iraqi government gains ground here, and loses ground there." In February, an ISIS offensive in Anbar threatened al-Asad airbase, where US troops are training Iraqi soldiers. "Things are shifting, but not to anyone's particular advantage. "The news in Anbar is more mixed," Ollivant says. To be clear, ISIS isn't on the retreat everywhere. Re-taking Mosul would be a major blow to ISIS. Ollivant describes much of the Kurdish progress in the north as a "circling around Mosul." Though the Kurds won't attempt to retake the city on their own, a joint Iraqi-Kurdish force is now poised to do so. They took the town of Sinjar, which sits on the highway, in December by late January, they had taken a longer stretch of the highway near a town called Kiske. In northern Iraq, Kurdish forces are threatening to cut off a highway that serves as ISIS's main supply line between Iraq and Syria. will lose its battle to hold territory in Iraq" "There are a significant string of victories all along the northern river valley, up through Diyala and Salahuddin ," Doug Ollivant, National Security Council Director for Iraq from 2008-2009 and current managing partner at Mantid International, explained. "There's really nowhere where has momentum," Kirk Sowell, the principal at Uticensis Risk Services and an expert on Iraqi politics, told me in late January. Slowly, unevenly, but surely, ISIS is being pushed back. After ISIS's seemingly unstoppable rampage from June to August of 2014, the Iraqi government and its allies have turned the tide. In that year, the situation has changed dramatically. Today, the Iraqi government is prepping a counter-offensive aimed at seizing Mosul back, which the US believes will launch in April. One year ago, ISIS was soon to launch the offensive in Iraq that, in June, would sweep across northern Iraq and conquer the country's second-largest city, Mosul. ( Institute for the Study of War/Sinan Adnan) Believe it or not, Iraq is looking better than anyone could have hoped six months agoĬontrol of territory in Iraq as of February 2, 2015. Unless ISIS starts adapting, there's a very good chance its so-called caliphate is going to fall apart. Its governance model is unsustainable and risks collapse in the long run. Coalition airstrikes have hamstrung its ability to wage offensive war, and it has no friends to turn to for help. It is losing territory in the places that matter. But, after months of ISIS expansion and victories, the group is now being beaten back. The group is not on the verge of defeat, nor is its total destruction guaranteed. It's certainly true that ISIS remains a terrible and urgent threat to the Middle East. Fighters pledging themselves to ISIS recently executed 21 Christians in Libya. This may seem hard to believe: in Iraq and Syria, the group still holds a stretch of territory larger than the United Kingdom, manned by a steady stream of foreign fighters. If you want to understand what's happening in the Middle East today, you need to appreciate one fundamental fact: ISIS is losing its war for the Middle East.
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