The Islamic State’s control over large swaths of land in Iraq and Syria is slowly diminishing, as it is being aggressively pummeled by local and international forces, such as Kurdish and Iraqi forces on one side and coalition forces on the other. However, more can be done, say experts and combatants engaged in the war against the terrorist organization.

The war on IS launched by the US-led coalition in Iraq in September 2014 yielded positive results, with the organization losing 14% of its territory as of Dec. 14, according to estimates by the IHS Conflict Monitor team.

In spite of successive defeats with the loss of the city of Tikrit, the contested Beiji refinery complex, the transit route connecting Mosul to the city of Raqqa in Syria, and most recently Ramadi, the organization is far from being destroyed. “IS has had debilitating setbacks from a military perspective,” retired Col. Harry Schute, consulting adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) on security affairs, told Al-Monitor.

IS has shifted to a defensive position, as stated in a report Dec. 21 by the Institute for the Study of War. The report underlined that IS had launched spoiling attacks across Iraq on multiple fronts, in Beiji, Makhoul and Sinjar in northern Iraq, as well as Hit and Ramadi in western Iraq. The organization has led “diversionary and probing attacks near Tikrit, Samarra and Fallujah, to forestall any upcoming anti-IS operations elsewhere in Iraq and force anti-IS forces shift resources to re-secure targeted areas,” as per the same report.