Much current rhetoric from the coalition of states fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is remarkably confident. After they met on 2 June 2015, the United States deputy secretary of state Antony Blinken even said that the war was being won. A day later, Blinken - standing in for John Kerry after his accident - told Radio France International that coalition forces had killed 10,000 Islamic State paramilitaries since the air war started in August 2014.
These figures cannot be independently verified. And more generally, this positive outlook (from the coalition’s standpoint) seems greatly at odds with other reports. On the very day of the coalition talks, a complex IS operation in Anbar province, west of Baghdad, killed forty-five Iraqi police officers. On 17 May, the provincial capital Ramadi had fallen to a small force of IS fighters; the far greater numbers of Iraqi soldiers, including member of the elite Golden Brigades, retreated rapidly from the city (see "Iraq's phantom army", 21 May 2015).
In Syria at the same time, other Islamic State units took over Palmyra and made gains towards the key northern city of Aleppo. In the latter case there were credible reports that Bashar al-Assad's regime was attacking rebels who stood in the way of the IS advance, a tactic most likely part of Assad’s long-standing (and hugely devious) policy of indirectly aiding Islamic State.
