The problem at the heart of ISIS — and why the world seems unable to solve it

Vox ^ | 11/23 | Max Fisher

[TangledUpInBlue]

If you look at a map of ISIS's territory over the past year, it seems to tell a promising story. The group has lost "something like 25 percent of their territory" since just last summer, according to Brookings scholar William McCants. In Iraq, it's lost the city of Tikrit and appears on the verge of losing Ramadi. In Syria, US-backed Kurdish groups have retaken much of the Turkish border and are moving nearer to Raqqa, the group's headquarters.

"You look back to the past two months," Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told my colleague Zack Beauchamp, "and it's just two month of steady losses."

Yet even as it is losing territory — and maybe even because of this — ISIS has become more dangerous to the world. It killed 27 in Kuwait City, 38 in Sousse, 43 in Beirut, and 224 in the air over Sinai, all in the months before killing 130 in Paris. Even if ISIS loses its "caliphate" in Syria and Iraq, it seems all but certain it will revert to what it was before, when it was known as al-Qaeda in Iraq: an insurgency and terrorist group. In that incarnation, it killed thousands and helped turn the US-led invasion of Iraq into a civil war.

[AllAmericanGirl44]

I’m confused, this article states that the Kurds are backed by the U.S. I didn’t know that to be the case. Is that verified? Thanks

[WMarshal]

we are in trouble because lefties don’t understand that you need to shoot a mad dog, not feed it and try to make it love you.

[SgtHooper]

An asinine attempt to understand ISIS!? How stupid. Send this moron over there to convince ISIS to halt fighting.