In all probability, it'll be even more than 30,000 although they won't call more than 30,000 combatants since the other few tens of thousands will be securing airbases and other facilities if the Iraqi Army falls apart yet again.
JMHo
Antiwar.com keeps tallies of reported deaths. As we know from the Viet Nam war, these aren’t always reliable. But they show about 8,000 ISIS militants dead since the start of the year. Whether you’re talking the 30,000 core fighters the US DoD refers to, or the 200,000 supporters that the Kurds claim ISIS has, those 8,000 deaths have got to be significant.
The Western media seems to be acting like a cheerleader for ISIS, making a handful of recruits here, a handful there sound like a steady torrent of recruits, in some cases outright claiming that they are replacing fallen ISIS fighters as quickly as the Kurds can kill them. That’s BS. Even if the raw numbers bear out such claims, it’s the experienced fighters that are dying, replaced by idiot yokuls, and the other fighters have to be noticing their comrades dying in waves and starting to feel like maybe their god isn’t behind them after all.
The collapse of the Iraqi Army as ISIS attacked, was largely the Sunnis and Kurds defecting en masse to their respective sectarian communities/militias, and the Shia then panicking (most of the technical specialists were Sunni). Everyone had lost faith in Prime Minister Maliki as nothing but a sectarian Shite.
That has stabilized now as a primarily Shia force, augmented by Shia Militias commanded by Iranian officers. They may be defeated, but they are unlikely to just dissolve like before.