Under pressure, IS on back foot

Damascus: Stretched thin and under pressure by increasing air strikes, the Islamic State has been forced into a defensive position in areas under its control in Syria and Iraq.

Last year, the jihadist group declared a self-styled caliphate across the borders of Syria and Iraq, sweeping quickly into Mosul and Raqa. It also expanded beyond the Middle East, launching a series of spectacular attacks abroad that left dozens dead.

But some experts believe the jihadist group’s luck has changed. “In recent months, IS’ positions along most of its fighting fronts in Syria and Iraq have turned defensive,” says Iraqi expert Hisham al-Hashimi, who closely follows jihadist developments. “It has lost the initiative that it depended on to attack its enemies,” he adds. Hashimi attributes the transformation partly to military pressure by the air wars against the group, which has been unable to move its forces in large columns the way it did last year.

The US-led coalition fighting IS in Syria has been growing, with Britain and France recently conducting strikes on IS positions the war-torn country. And on September 30, Russia began carrying out its own aerial campaign on the group, as well as other armed groups opposed to Damascus. Furthermore, IS’s “logistical stores have been drained,” Hashimi says, and many of its key cross-border supply routes have been cut in recent months. The extremist group has also depleted another key resource: suicide bombers, which proved crucial to IS’s lightning attacks on cities in Iraq and Syria, but are in increasingly rare supply.