The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group has lost about 14 percent of its territory after Russian intervention beginning, while Syria’s Kurds have almost tripled the land they control.
The development should be seen as a blow to the group given its stated aim to capture and hold territory to expand its so-called “caliphate” to a quasi-worldwide Islamic empire.
The losses of ISIL include the strategically important town of Tal Abyad on Syria’s border with Turkey, the Iraqi city of Tikrit, and Iraq’s Baiji refinery. Other big losses for the group include a stretch of highway between its Syrian stronghold Raqqa and Mosul in northern Iraq, complicating supply lines.
The Islamic group’s territory had shrunk 12,800 square kilometres from a total 78,000 square kilometers, mostly after the Russian intervention beginning.
However, ISIL has made some high-profile gains during the first part of the year, including the historic Syrian town of Palmyra and the city centre of Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar, Iraq’s largest province.
Land under Syrian Kurdish control jumped +186 percent over the year, the intelligence review said. This indicates that the Islamic State (ISIL) 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. The Kurds appear to be primarily an obstruction to the Islamic State, rather than an objective in themselves.
Syrian Kurdish fighters dominate a group called the Syrian Democratic Forces, a coalition of Kurdish and Arab fighters battling ISIL in northeastern Syria, that has grown in prominence in recent months.
In the meanwhile, Iraq’s government managed to claw back some six percent of its territory from ISIL in the past year, while Iraqi Kurds regained two percent of their lands.
The biggest territorial loser among the main factions in the Syrian conflict was the Syrian government, which lost 16 percent and is now left with around 30,000 square kilometres, less than half the total area controlled by ISIL and a tiny fraction of Syria’s total area of about 185,000 square kilometres.
Source article: ISIL ‘caliphate’ shrank by 14 percent in 2015: monitor