Isis may be weakened by co-ordinated attacks but it is far from being overcome

[Jefferson23]

World View: Isis is coming under growing military pressure from its many enemies, but learns quickly from its mistakes

Patrick Cockburn

21 hours ago

The war in Iraq may become more like the war in Afghanistan over the coming years. Isis forces in fixed and identifiable positions cannot withstand ground assaults backed with intense air attacks by the US Air Force or, in the case of the Syrian army, by the Russians. The last extreme-fundamentalist Sunni state in the wider Middle East found this out in 2001 when US air strikes in support of the numerically smaller Northern Alliance overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan. Like the Afghan Taliban, Isis may progressively revert to guerrilla war, in which it can best use its highly committed and well-trained fighters without suffering heavy losses.

Isis is coming under growing military pressure from its many enemies on many fronts. The Iraqi army, supported by US air strikes, has recaptured Ramadi, the city that Isis fighters took last May in their biggest victory of 2015. At the opposite border of the self-declared caliphate, the Syrian Kurds are threatening Isis’s hold north of Aleppo and on those parts of northern Syria where it is still in control.

Could it be that the tide has turned finally and irreversibly against Isis? Everywhere it is fighting against ground forces backed by air power, which means that it suffers heavy casualties while opposing troops are unscathed. This was demonstrated during the four-and-a-half-month siege of the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani in which Isis lost an estimated 2,200 men, killed mostly by bombs and missiles. The city was 70 per cent destroyed and the same may be true of Ramadi, which has been hit by some 600 air strikes since July.

In the first half of 2015, Isis had several advantages that it has now lost or is in the process of losing. At that time, it had easy access to Turkey at the Tal Abyad border-crossing point, which the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) captured in June. It can still move people and supplies across a narrow strip of the frontier west of the Euphrates but the Syrian Democratic Forces, who are in fact the YPG slightly diluted by Sunni Arabs and Christians, seized the October Dam on the Euphrates on 23 December, thus threatening Isis’s whole position north of Aleppo.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/isis-may-be-weakened-by-co-ordinated-attacks-but-it-is-far-from-being-overcome-a6793986.html