Daesh on the back foot?

For the first time the battlefield reports suggest that the forces of much feared Islamic State, commonly known by its Arabic acronym Daesh, are on the back foot. The Kurdish peshmerga has broken the siege of Mount Sinjar where some 1700 members of Yazidi minority took refuge in August after their main town of Singir was stormed and hundreds of its residents were butchered by the Islamic State jihadist forces. The town too is expected to fall to the Kurdish forces that have retaken its major locations after fierce fighting, as they moved in under intense US-led international coalition airstrikes. The city of Tal-Afar further east is also under the Kurdish attack, and as it falls the Islamic State will have lost the link between Mosul, its stronghold in Iraq, with its territories in Syria. It is a huge strategic victory the Kurdish peshmerga has delivered to the federal government in Baghdad, and possibly may become the turning point in the so-called caliphate's six-month-long fierce struggle to bring the whole of erstwhile Mesopotamia under its control. The airstrikes are said to have eliminated "multiple senior and middle-level IS leaders", including Abu Bakar al-Bagdadi's deputy in charge of Iraq. Meanwhile, there are reports that the Islamic State leadership is thinking of vacating Mosul, provided it is suitably compensated in monetary terms and is given safe passage out of the city, which fell to it in August and marked the arrival of the 'caliphate' on the world map. Being more of a tactician, unlike the al Qaeda leadership that nurtures essentially a theological worldview, al-Baghdadi is content with occupation of land than to go for the conquest of mind. And if his juggernaut is on retreat now it is not because of generalship in Baghdad or any other world capital, but because of the hardy Kurdish fighters who have Marxist-Jeninist roots, both men and women, who when suitably armed had single-handedly secured the city of Kobane on the Syrian-Turkish border falling to the IS jihadists. And, by the same token they have established legitimacy of their long-denied right to independent statehood.
Unlike its two other extremist comrade-in-arms, Boko Haram and Taliban, incubated relatively over longer periods, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) made an abrupt appearance and made quick gains, in terms of both captured territory and military prowess. It inherited modern fighting arms from the Iraqi forces as they abandoned Mosul, was generously enriched initially by wealthy individuals in the Gulf Arab states and later on by looting banks in captured territory and selling captured oil - to the same party it was fighting in Syria. But what sent its fear down many a spine in the region and beyond were it blood-soaked videos it made and aired with the help of foreign jihadists quite a few from the West. Is it the Daesh's appeal to obtain 'original' Islam in Iraq and Syria whatever it costs or is its fighters' insatiate appetite for innocent blood that attracts it volunteers from far and wide; the videos released by it from time to time give the answer. Of course, there is a history to what, and who, created these monsters. But the people who are being asked to pay for that are definitely not among them, and we in Pakistan know it better than many in the world outside. The 132 schoolchildren and nine of their teachers were part of any plan or programme, which the blood-thirsty revenge-seeking Taliban killed last week in Peshawar. We also know that the tens of thousands of Yazidis hounded and killed by the IS fighters are not part of the forces they are contending with for territorial gains. Nor the girls and women the Boko Haram kidnapped and married off to its foot soldiers joined the Nigerian armed forces. No wonder then the very Muslim populations the extremists think are the ones they want to serve are prime victims of their misplaced zeal to serve Islam. And no surprise that no tear has been shed at the hanging of terrorists in this country where 95 percent of population is Muslim.