Is ISIS Losing its Edge?

“Do not believe ISIL is ‘manageable,’” U.S. senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) warned her constituents via Twitter on September 3. “To defeat this enemy, we will have to risk Americans who will be operating in the fight,” House Intelligence Committee Chairperson Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) added in a TIME article the following the day. These calls from Capitol Hill for boots on the ground to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were made at a time when ISIS’s onslaught seemed unstoppable. The organization had been rapidly gaining vast swaths of territory, inching closer and closer to what seemed an inevitable seizure of Baghdad. But now, almost five months since ISIS conquered Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, it appears that the group may finally be losing its edge. Despite Shaheen and Rogers’ fears, the United States may not have to send troops to the Middle East after all.
In late October, Iraqi government forces celebrated a major victory in the city of Jurf al-Sakhar. The battle marked one of the first times the state military was able to seize key strategic land previously under ISIS control. The Sunni group has largely succeeded in capturing territory in the predominantly Sunni western province of Anbar, but it is becoming increasingly clear that heavily Shi’ite regions to the south, where support for the extremists is lower, pose more difficulty to the once-invincible jihadist army. The Obama administration’s recent airstrikes on ISIS have further impeded the expansion of its domain. While most experts doubt that the U.S. attacks are sufficient to defeat the Islamic State, many agree that they have at least hindered the organization’s ability to gather into large groups for full-scale military assaults, as such armies make easy targets for aerial attacks. Moving equipment and personnel has become drastically more dangerous and therefore hard to coordinate.
A seemingly obvious tactical solution to this dilemma would be for ISIS to abandon traditional military assaults in favor of the guerilla-style warfare that proved so remarkably effective against American airstrikes in Vietnam. However, at the moment when ISIS declared itself a caliphate, its reputation became linked to its viability as a legitimate governing body. Its campaign of fear and military domination cannot afford to devolve into a rebel insurgency as long as the first “S” in ISIS stands for “State.”
Meanwhile, in Syria, developments are similarly showing signs of hope that local forces can oust the militants without the help of U.S. soldiers. The Kurdish city of Kobane, situated along the Turkish border, was initially expected to be an easy target for ISIS. Surprisingly, however, local fighters with financial and logistical support from Washington have kept the Islamic State’s army at bay for almost a month, dealing approximately 500 ISIS causalities. In many conquered regions, city dwellers simply fled their hometowns in order to avoid ISIS’s brutality and oppression, but the residents of Kobane, backed up against a well-protected international border, were left with no choice but to stay and fight. They have demonstrated that, with some tactical assistance from the West, ISIS is far from unbeatable.
Of course, there is no guarantee that ISIS can be dismantled without the deployment of ground troops from the United States or some other first-world power. Jurf al-Sakhar could be taken back, Kobane could fall, and the Islamic State could regain the momentum that had the whole world on edge this past June. Nevertheless, given current trends, those events seem unlikely. For now, the United States should continue to launch airstrikes and dole out aid to local fighters resisting the jihadists. But otherwise, it should wait to see whether ISIS can be substantially weakened even without the deployment of its own troops before entrenching itself in another long and costly war in the Middle East.