The Washington Post said Daesh is in danger of losing a highway that serves as a lifeline for its militants in northern Iraq.
It said the road runs from the group’s Iraq stronghold in Mosul to its enclaves in northeastern Syria, including its self-styled capital, Raqqa, 300 miles away.
"The road has been controlled by the jihadists since last summer. But in late January, Iraqi Kurdish forces seized a stretch of the highway at the town of Kiske, west of Mosul," the Post said.
Daesh is still using the highway, detouring onto back roads to get around Kiske.
But if the Iraqi Kurdish fighters can maintain and expand their hold on the road, the Islamist extremists “will be under a kind of siege in the area. It will be very hard for them” logistically, said Hisham al-Hashemi, an Iraqi researcher who is an expert on the radical group.
Blocking the highway would pressure the Sunni fighters to rely on lengthier and potentially riskier routes to transport people, cash and weapons, analysts say.
The loss of the highway between Mosul and Raqqa would be not just a logistical defeat for Daesh but a psychological one, analysts say.
“The integrity of the caliphate — it’s built on continuous military victory,” said Jessica Lewis McFate, research director at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.