Muslim jihadists (ISIS’s) advance looked unstoppable A month ago. Now it’s been stopped.

ISIS’s advance looked unstoppable. Now it’s been stopped.

ISIS's defeats in Iraq are more important than its gains...

A month ago

Watching the news, you could be forgiven for thinking that ISIS is an unstoppable juggernaut, sweeping Iraq and Syria in an unending, unstoppable, terrible blitzkrieg.

But you'd be wrong. The truth is that ISIS's momentum is stalled: in both Iraq and Syria, the group is being beaten back at key points. There are initial signs — uncertain, sketchy, but hopeful — that the group is hurting more than you may think, and has stalled out in the war it was for so long winning. ISIS isn't close to being destroyed. But they are reeling.

ISIS's defeats in Iraq are more important than its gains

In mid-October, ISIS advanced to within 16 miles of the Baghdad airport. Many observers (and many Iraqis), fearing an ISIS assault on Baghdad itself, understandably panicked. But to Michael Knights, the Lafer Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the ISIS advance meant something else.

"The threat posed to Baghdad this autumn is emerging less because [ISIS] is winning the war in Iraq," he wrote in Politico Magazine, "and more because it might be slowly but steadily losing it."

To understand what Knights means, you have to understand the basic dynamic of the see-saw war between ISIS and the Iraqi government. The war has been bifurcated: while ISIS has been making big inroads in the western, heavily Sunni Anbar province, it's being pushed back in the other major battlefields around the country, including Rabia, a northwest border town linking ISIS's holdings in Iraq and Syria.

In late October, ISIS suffered a defeat in an even more crucial area. Iraqi government forces took Jurf al-Sakhar, a town (in the area labeled Northern Babil in the above map) that Knights describes as an ISIS stronghold. This was a real defeat. As Reuters put it, "the victory could allow Iraqi forces to prevent the Sunni insurgents from edging closer to the capital, sever connections to their strongholds in western Anbar province, and stop them infiltrating the mainly Shi'ite Muslim south."

The question, then, is whether ISIS's recent victories in Anbar have been more important than its defeats. That's not obvious. It's also not obvious that its advances in Anbar can be translated into victories elsewhere; the Anbar campaign owes a lot to the tactical acumen of one commander, the Chechen fighter Abu Umar al-Shishani.  "You have Shishani running wild in Anbar, employing very different tactics than ISIS is employing in the rest of Iraq and Syria," says Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

The contrast makes ISIS's setbacks outside of Anbar look even more significant. Shishani doesn't control broader ISIS strategy, nor does he seem capable of turning it around even if he did run it. "In terms of their offensive operations, Anbar is going well," Gartenstein-Ross says. "Everywhere else, they appear to have hit their limitations."