ISIS Is Losing the War, But That Doesn’t Mean We’re Winning It

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Zack Beauchamp says that ISIS is losing the war. His evidence is the map on the right. ISIS may have taken over Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria, but overall they’ve lost about 9 percent of the territory they controlled at the beginning of the year:

This points to one of ISIS’s most fundamental problems: It has too many enemies….ISIS’s fighters might be skilled, but they can’t fight everyone at once.

True enough. What may be more interesting, though, is who they lost that territory to. Here are the numbers for territorial gains:

+11% — Syrian rebels
+10% — Kurdish forces
+4.5% — Iraqi government

In other words, Iraqi forces were responsible for less than a fifth of the total gains from ISIS. Add to that their humiliating loss in Ramadi, about an hour’s drive from Baghdad, and there’s still not much evidence that the Iraqi government has a clue about how to fight ISIS. It remains unclear how and when that will change.