War on terror

Throughout ISIS’s three-month siege of Kobani, the heavily Kurdish Syrian border town, many wondered whether the battle would prove the Islamic State’s Waterloo. For a group that so heavily relies on propaganda and momentum, its apparent defeat there this week at the hands of Kurdish forces (backed by American airstrikes) stings far beyond the battlefield.

“ISIL’s defeat in Kobane further shatters the organization’s claims to invincibility,” Al Jazeera‘s Mohammed Salih writes, “particularly as it coincides with the group’s retreat from Kurdish and other Iraqi forces in northern and central Iraq.”

An Incomplete Victory in the War Against ISIS

Islamic State forces have reportedly lost the Syrian border town of Kobani, but it's not necessarily a turning point in the war.