ISIS Just Suffered its Worst Defeat Yet — Losing the Iraqi City of Tikrit

Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, had been an ISIS stronghold for almost a year. On Wednesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi marched through the city's center holding an Iraqi flag. Though fighting continued in some neighborhoods, the core of the city had been liberated from ISIS.

This is a major victory for Iraq: Tikrit is the largest city yet to be pried from ISIS's grasp.

But Baghdad might want to hold off celebrating just yet. The big, looming problem facing Iraq isn't just taking territory back from ISIS: it's holding it.

In Tikrit, as in virtually all of the territory held by ISIS in Iraq, the residents are largely Sunni Muslims. One of the key ways ISIS's Sunni extremists were able to grow so strong in Iraq was by exploiting the deep rift between the Sunni minority and Shia majority. Iraq's government must convince Sunnis in places like Tikrit that it speaks for them; without fixing the political problems that helped lead to ISIS's rise, the same thing could very well happen again.

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 ISIS's current strategy depends on taking, holding, and governing territory. Its recruiting message and, really, its entire political project is staked on one theory: they are the true revival of the early Islamic caliphate, destined not only to maintain and expand their theocratic state but maybe even to bring on the apocalypse.

“When they declared the caliphate, their legitimacy came to rest on the continuing viability of their state,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me in October.

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