News Analysis: IS remains tough U.S. foe despite recent battlefield loss in Syria

A major Islamic State (IS) loss on the battlefield earlier this week in Kobani, Syria underscores the terrorist force's limits, but the group remains a tough adversary for the U.S. and its allies, U.S. experts said.

In a joint effort between Kurdish ground forces and the U.S.-led coalition on Monday, IS militants were driven out of Kobani in a battle that raged through the city over the last three months.

Kobani was one of several cities the Islamist radicals overran in Syria and northern Iraq during the last several months in a bid to set up its own dictatorship ruled by radical Islamist ideology.

Some experts said the battle demonstrates the limits of the radicals' military power.

"The Islamic State's reverse at Kobani shows vividly that IS many months ago reached the limits of its military reach," Wayne White, former deputy director of U.S. State Department's Middle East Intelligence Office, told Xinhua.

"In a desperate effort to avoid defeat at Kobani, IS threw large numbers of fighters, weapons and military vehicles into the Kobani meat grinder, perhaps losing over 1,000 combatants," White added.

This was not the first IS loss, and came after other heavy losses that have diminished IS' capabilities not only around Kobani, but also in fighting with Iraqi and Iraq Kurdish forces, as well as from the steady attrition from the U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, he said.

Already there are reports that the shift from easy Islamic State victories last summer to grueling battles has demoralized a significant number of IS fighters, with special IS police charged with combing homes in its capital Raqqa, Syria for fighters hiding from frontline duty, White noted.

IS STILL FORMIDABLE DESPITE LOSSES

Still, it is unclear whether IS recruitment has suffered. Indeed, foreign recruits who have not experienced the horrors of combat under coalition air attacks may still be gullible enough to come in large numbers.

However, even if the numbers of foreign volunteers are not down, they cannot readily replace the loss of many seasoned combat veterans, White noted.

U.S.-led forces later capitalized on their win, pounding IS forces in Syria and Iraq with 19 airstrikes in a 24-hour period, the U.S. Defense Department said on Wednesday.

But despite this week's loss and the follow-up coalition strikes, the Islamist terror group remains a tough opponent, and the group still holds large chunks of territory and major cities in Iraq and Syria.

Some experts also said the battle at Kobani underscored the radicals' stubborn resolve to hold ground in the face of vicious coalition air attacks.

"ISIS (IS) is still well-entrenched in the areas it controls and still has access to human and other resources," Dlawer Ala' aldeen, president of the Middle East Research Institute in Erbil, Iraq told the Time magazine. "It's not the beginning of the end in any schematic way."

White echoed those thoughts, billing IS as "a formidable foe" despite recent losses.

IS THREATENS OBAMA

Meanwhile, IS militants appear to remain as bold as ever. A recently released video posted by IS shows the terror group making direct threats against U.S. President Barack Obama, raising the question of whether the group can pull off an attack on U.S. soil.

"Know, oh Obama, that will reach America," said an IS fighter in a video discovered this week. "Know also that we will cut off your head in the White House, and transform America into a Muslim Province."

The video is not the first time the group has threatened the U.S., but does mark the first time IS terrorists have called out Obama by name, a move that may indicate the group feeling empowered and emboldened by gains in the Middle East.

Despite the threats and this month's bloody terror attacks in Paris that killed more than a dozen French journalists and hostages, Obama's focus appears to be more on domestic affairs, to which he devoted the bulk of last week's State of the Union address.

In a televised speech lasting around an hour, Obama devoted only a few minutes to the worldwide terror threat, even at a time when a recent Pew poll finds that countering terror is now Americans' first priority for 2015. Endit