Sudden retreats don’t mean that ISIS is defeated

Hasaka became the second Syrian province to be fully liberated from ISIS in two years, after Idlib around this time in 2014. According to local reports, the group’s withdrawal from its last stronghold in Hasaka was “swift and surprising”. This sudden defeat, which follows similar ones in recent months, raises questions about the group’s current capabilities.
ISIS’s loss of Shaddadi, its last outpost in Hasaka, is significant and symbolic. This was the town from where, in 2014, the group planned much of its effort to take or secure its control of Syrian territory. Jabhat Al Nusra, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, crumbled there after most of its fighters switched sides when Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi announced the formation of ISIS. The city was the planning centre for ISIS, and there were rumours that Mr Al Baghdadi had visited it a few times.
The defeat is also operationally remarkable. The group has now lost control over oilfields – about 200 small oil wells and major oilfields such as Jibisa and Kabibah – and critical areas that could potentially weaken its defences in Deir Ezzor, Raqqa and even Mosul.
A day after the loss of Shaddadi, the Syrian regime announced that it had retaken from ISIS the thermal power station in Aleppo’s eastern countryside, near Al Bab, one of the group’s bastions. Losing the power station is a blow to ISIS as it helps the regime secure the Kweiris airbase, 15km away, the midpoint between Aleppo and Raqqa. Dubai-based Orient News reported that ISIL lost control of 25 villages between Kweiris and the thermal power station.
The defeats in Hasaka and Aleppo could threaten ISIS’s heartlands, especially since it has been driven out of areas to the north, east and west of Raqqa. Its withdrawals from Tal Abyad in June, a vital border outpost for ISIS, and from areas in southern Hasaka in November were similarly described as swift, with the group hardly putting up a fight. The same was said of its defeat in Sinjar.
Such moves are a stark departure from its strategy in Kobani two years ago, when the group sent hundreds of its recruits to fight in a losing battle as the terrain was exposed and the US-led air campaign had just started in Syria. Several reasons could be put forward to help explain the sudden defeats.
ISIL could have decided after Kobani that everywhere the US-led coalition concentrates its air strikes, the fight becomes an issue of depletion that it should avoid. But if that is the case, why did it not follow the same script in the Iraqi cities of Tikrit and Ramadi? Instead of allowing the approaching Kurdish-led forces, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to essentially walk into the city, ISIS could have resisted inside the city and repeated its previous patterns in Iraq, where a city would be almost destroyed by the time the extremists left.
Another possible reason is that the group simply does not have enough manpower to sustain a fight, despite its control of the population for 21 months. It was clear since November that Shaddadi was next for the SDF in Hasaka, so ISIS had time to prepare for the fight, bolster its defences and turn the town into a fortress to distract and deplete the SDF.
But there is a more likely reason behind such quick withdrawals. ISIS might be seeking to increase fears in Turkey by concentrating its capabilities in areas it regards as priorities and allowing the Kurds to expand in Hasaka and near the Turkish borders in Raqqa.

Compiled by Hassan Hassan