The Problem at the Heart of ISIS — and Why the World Seems Unable to Solve It

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.

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“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.”

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