An Incomplete Victory in Kobani

 

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." Some experts have emphasized the importance of the defeat in the context of the group's efforts to mobilize foreign fighters⎯Australians, Canadians, Europeans, and recruits from across the Middle East were among the 1,200 killed in Kobani while fighting under the Islamic State banner.

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