ISIS has lost 14% of its territory

Anti-ISIS Kurdish Peshmerga troops

But Break Down the Numbers

• In Kurdistan  -  ISIS lost ground against the Kurds who have been starved of weapons by Obama and the Western powers while the Kurds were being bombed by NATO member Turkey.
• In Iraq  -  ISIS lost ground in Iraq where Iranian militias were in the field fighting shoulder to shoulder with Iraqi troops.
• In Syria  -  ISIS is gaining ground.
• Bottom Line  -  Where ISIS has been turned back the U.S. has not had much of a role.

(Business Insider)  -  The IHS Conflict Monitor estimates that ISIS has lost 14% of its territory since January. Some of the areas that have been retaken from the group were crucial to the its operations — including the Syrian border-crossing town of Tal Abyad, which connected ISIS's de-facto capital of Raqqa with Turkey.

ISIS has also lost a stretch of highway that connected Raqqa to its largest Iraqi holding, the city of Mosul.

In Iraq, the group lost Tikrit and the Baiji oil refinery. But though Iraqi forces were successful in retaking Tikrit, it's been a struggle for them to allow displaced locals to return to their homes.

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And while ISIS lost some significant territory this year, the group also made some significant gains. It seized the Iraqi city of Ramadi and the Syrian city of Palmyra in a "near-simultaneous offensive" in May, IHS notes. But these gains came at the expense of ISIS's territory in northern Syria, much of which was lost to Kurdish fighters. It left those areas less protected as they redeployed fighters to Ramadi and Palmyra.

"This indicates that the Islamic State was overstretched, and also that holding Kurdish territory is considered to be of lesser importance than expelling the Syrian and Iraqi governments from traditionally Sunni lands" like Ramadi, Columb Strack, senior IHS Middle East analyst, wrote.

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Fighting ISIS

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