ISIS is Losing

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Though there have been some reports of ISIS advances in western Syria, “the territories they have gained are meaningless [or] they didn't get to keep them,” Abbas explains.

“All of their major offensives since the airstrikes began — Kobane, [Deir ez-Zor] Air Base, Sha'ir Gas Field — have either been stalemates or ended in outright defeat once they squared off against Assad's troops,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me in late January.

Part of the reason ISIS hasn't been pushed back further is that no other faction in Syria — Bashar al-Assad's regime, al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, or the major rebel groups — have concentrated their efforts on the Islamic State.
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ISIS has staked its entire political project on one theory: they are the true revival of the early Islamic caliphate, destined not only to maintain and expand their theocratic state but to bring on the apocalypse. Once you understand that, ISIS's blunders look less like miscalculations and more like inevitable results of its animating ideology.

“When they declared the caliphate, their legitimacy came to rest on the continuing viability of their state,” Gartenstein-Ross told me in October.

More rational insurgent groups, facing a conventionally stronger foe, have a well-established playbook. Stay away from open engagements, hide among a population that's willing to shelter you, and use hit-and-run attacks to bleed the enemy to death.
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