Politico: ISIS Winning

Politico Europe reports ISIS is winning, the story by Bruce Hoffman isn't pretty:

ISIL’s appeal will not diminish nor its allure end until this movement is militarily defeated and pushed out of Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces are patently incapable of this task. And, our de facto alliance with Iran and domestic Shi’a militias has heightened rather than assuaged Sunni fears of encirclement and furnished ISIL’s propagandists with a powerful narrative that more tightly binds the fate of indigenous populations to the protection the Islamic State provides.

We have to accept that Iraq has ceased to exist as a viable federal union and has now permanently splintered into Sunni, Shi’a and Kurdish enclaves. In these circumstances, our best option is to back the only reliable and militarily capable partners we have there—the Kurds. To date, both the Kurdish Peshmerga and YPG or People’s Protection Unit, its Syrian counterparts, are the only local forces who have demonstrated any effective ability to counter ISIL. Yet, American support of both is hamstrung by a misplaced deference to Turkey’s priorities—a NATO ally who has often proven as unhelpful in the war on terrorism in the Levant as Pakistan has been in South Asia.

I'd rather we backed the Kurds than Erdogan's Turks, and yet we still officially consider the Kurdish freedom fighters as "terrorists."