The slowly-shrinking caliphate

[DetlefK]

http://soufangroup.com/tsg-intelbrief-the-caliphate-loses-ground/

The IS is slowly loosing ground, which is a hard setback to its message of inevitability. Bombings and constant warfare with kurdish Peshmerga-fighters, the shiite iraqi army and sunni militias are taking their toll.

How does the IS react? It slightly alters it's official maps to obscure the backwards-trend and ignores the catastrophic reality with deafening silence.
Offensives get blunted, village by village gets lost, Iraq regained control of key areas and oil installations. The IS reacts with videos of warfare on social media. With depictions of a glorious battle-field and martyric suicide-bombings. Foreign fighters stream in, ignorant or heedless to the fact that reality no longer matches the PR-campaign of the everexpanding IS, the epicenter of an inevitable muslim Golden Age.

The IS is still a considerable power, but its days of expansion in Iraq are over. The only chance the IS has is finding a safe haven in a Syria drowning in the blood of a civil-war, because nobody would dare to follow for fear of the political consequences.

The question remains:
How much blood will it take to dig them out and to free those under their yoke?

[brush]

1. Hard to fight the US, Iran and Iraq forces

Not surprisingly, success against has not been attributed at all to Obama's foreign policy of getting all these other forces involved.

[okaawhatever]

2. Great news. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of d-bags. May this be the beginning of the end of ISnt

[femmocrat]

3. This is a really good read. Interesting source, too!

I found this sentence of interest as it reflects on US involvement:

Criticism of coalition airstrikes focused on the lack of immediate results, and, while airstrikes will in no way solve the problems that precipitated the rise of the Islamic State, it appears that the strategy of containing the group while building up its opposition is beginning to bear positive results.