In 1942 Germany had the Russian forces in rapid retreat and branched off to capture the Ukrainian oil fields, and Stalingrad on the way. They quickly captured the majority of the city, but quickly found that the fighting in the rubble meant that their superior heavy weapons had little effect on an entrenched infantry, and that it was impossible to cut off Russian resupply across the Volga river.

This combined with long supply lines and an exposed flank, meant that this struggled consumed a disproportionate amount of energy men and materiel, halted their advance, and drained resources from elsewhere. The final collapse and surrender of the 6th Army marked the turning point of the Russian campaign.

There are clear parallels with Kobani. ISIS using captured weapons from Iraq have extended their reach to Kobani, and have assaulted it with an assumed overwhelming force against lightly armed militia.

ISIS's problems in achieving their objective have been that
-they underestimated the determination of the Kurds (largely due to the barbaric treatment of those surrendering),
-ISIS has failed to cut off the Kurds resupply lines to the city from the North, and
-under estimated the damage that the US and allies could do to their heavy weapons, entrenched positions and supply lines.

ISIS has now lost hundreds of men and much irreplaceable heavy weapons, and is facing a stark choice of either committing further men and equipment to the meat grinder the US has set up for them in a slender hope of occupying the city in an extended campaign, or a humiliating retreat from most of the area that would significantly dent their recruitment drives especially if fighters left behind are pictured hanged or decapitated by a vengeful population they previously brutalised. This of course does not take into account the losses they are suffering in Iraq, and their deteriorating finances.

In my opinion, while this does not mean that ISIS is finished, it may mean that their easy victories are finished, and they will now need to fight just to exist.

Yes, SM,

Our prayers are with the brave Kurds, who are saving themselves and stopping that which may otherwise be unstoppable by the crumbling West.

If not for them, this is what awaits us: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-21/abdullah-elmir-abu-khaled-singles-out-australia-to-is-militants/5830100

We don't deserve to lick the dust of their shoes.

Breslau would be a better analogue than Stalingrad, in taking the city the Soviets lost men at a rate of two to one compared to the Germans but they finally prevailed.
The Turks might allow PKK and Peshmerga fighters to "relieve" Kobane then cut them off and let ISIS destroy them, two birds with one stone.

Yuyutsu

I guess you missed the part about Kobani being about to fall before western intervention.

Yuyutsu,
Oh yeah you Lefties just lurrrrve the PKK, who incidentally have killed thousands of people including other Kurds.
"Not fit to lick the dust from their boots", give me a break,this is a fight between two factions who are both equally hostile to Europeans and equally dangerous.

Yuyutsu >> We don't deserve to lick the dust of their shoes.<<

Can you please explain what exactly that is supposed to mean. I cannot make any sense of that comment. Who is "we" and who's shoes?

And the crumbling West...

Maybe you missed a dose of your medicine as this must be your craziest post yet.

A couple of weeks ago, all we heard from the left whingers is that the Allied attack on ISIS was pointless.

The point I was trying to convey with this thread is that not only is it not pointless, but there are now clear signs that it is working and that even in these early stages ISIS's previously successful strategies can be turned against them.

Kobani has instead of being yet another quick trophy for ISIS has trapped a large portion of its fighting force that is being steadily degraded from in front and above, with supply lines that are cut off. It faces obliteration or surrender if it stays, and a massacre if it tries to run across the open areas between towns.

Either way, it will suffer a public relations humiliation, and a weakened fighting force that now has to fend off an emboldened foe.

Dear Hippie,

<<Can you please explain what exactly that is supposed to mean>>

It means that if they were not fighting against the IS in Kobani, then you would be fighting them on the shores of Australia, desperate to protect your own family.

I can see no parallel at all between what Isis is doing and what the Germans did. The Germans were a highly educated nation that had the best weapons manufacturing industry in the world. the only thing they had in common with Isis was that they were ruthless.the germans fought against the Russians who also had a weapons manufacturing industry as well as a winter that very conveniently made life impossible for the Germans who were being attacked by this time from all sides by British air forces and the USA who had by now the greatest weapons industry the world has ever seen or hopefully will see. Isis is part an internal struggle no more and no less they are doomed and they were doomed from the start.

'morning Robbb,

You said "I can see no parallel at all between what Isis is doing and what the Germans did"

I have no doubt you can't see, that is because you fail to understand the difference between tactics and strategy.

SM is only identifying the "seeds of defeat" inherent in the ISIL strategy. Move fast, take what you need with you, long supply lines, isolation through delayed conquest, re supply, natural degradation of assets, declines in resources vs escalation in resource demands and limited escape options.

Of course you can''t understand and most of us also understand why, you are an idiot.

Watching the ABC on "my brother the terrorist" last night identified for me the fact ISIL ideology is based on a lie. That being they want to defeat the decadent Western Democracies while killing Muslims and minorities in Islamic controlled lands. They hold to a primitive ideology that sanctions murder of non compliant Muslims. I would believe since ISIL began in Syria and Kurdish are now attacked that more Muslims have been slaughtered than any amount of Western persons. They promote the lie they are Fighting America and Australia in their propagandize, but they are murdering innocent Muslims.

As shadowminister stated, the atrocities meted out to their captured
enemy will lead to ISIS's ultimate undoing, a huge error the German forces made was in the killing maiming and torturing of the Russian populace who fell into their hands. Huge numbers of Russians would have been glad to assist the Germans in the overthrow of Stalin's regime but the utter stupidity of the invading Nazi's in their murderous tactics would eliminate any prospect of conquering the Soviet Union and would finally lead to them losing the war.

cicero

[Deleted. Off topic.]

There seem to be many major differences between ISIS' attack on Kobane and the German attack on Stalingrad.

The Germans had put huge numbers into the battle for Stalingrad, close to half a million, the bulk of their forces in Russia. The Russians surrounded the German forces, in about this week in 1942 and used the winter to degrade the Nazis, until they surrendered in January 1943. Nobody is talking about surrounding the ISIS forces outside of Kobane. And they would have put only a fraction of their forces there, up till now.

As well, ISIS soldiers don't care if they are killed - each one probably has his 72 virgins already marked out. Unless they are killed by one of those wonderful, incredibly brave, Kurdish women, of course. I don't think that Nazi soldiers were all that eager to die, even if 72 Aryan goddesses awaited each one.

As Spindoc says, there are differences between tactics and strategy. The Germans based so much of their strategy on capturing Stalingrad and getting access to the Baku oil-fields, they had no Plan B; while Kobane probably represents only a tactical manoeuvre by ISIS: they can retreat any time, and rapidly - thanks to 1400 Humvees captured at Mosul - shift their forces to menace Kirkuk or Baghdad. In a horrible sense, ISIS may have a multitude of Plan Bs.

ISIS may still have the offensive edge: the Nazis at Stalingrad may have been at their last offensive gasp. ISIS forces have many options, seizing territory and destroying city after city will mean nothing to them. Dying will mean nothing to them.

Somebody is bound to know better than me whether or not the Islamist-fascist philosophy depicts human activity and achievements such as the building of cities and dams and infrastructure as some sort of abomination against Allah. Their Allah is a god of total destruction of all human creations, in preparation not for bringing his world down to Earth, but for destroying an ignoble creation and bringing his most faithful up to paradise. And to the arms of those virgins.

Joe

The ultimate glory in ISIS is dying in the cause of Allah. They will never surrender as that is a sign of weakness.

Loudmouth,

I think that both you and Joe have over estimated the willingness to die of the ISIS forces. This is not borne out by past experiences.

The Germans were also fighting on the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad, and the 500 000 troops committed to Stalingrad were a small portion of the several million troops in Russia and more in Europe.

The whole ISIS contingent is estimated to be 30 000 of which several thousand are tied down in Kobane, and losses are estimated at over 600 men in the first month, with a considerable number of vehicles armoured and otherwise. While this may be seen as chump change compared the slaughter at Stalingrad, the losses at Kobane are more than 10x that at Mosul, and roughly 2% loss of one's entire force in few weeks.

This of course excludes the forces committed in numerous other areas also being pounded by the coalition forces and losing men and equipment.

Stalingrad has been given far greater significance in the war in the east since the war ended than it really had during the period of hostiliites.
There were much bigger and more devastating battles, such as at Kiev and the German defeat at Moscow was the real psychological turning point in the war, Stalingrad was just harder for Goebbels to censor and spin because they'd built it up in the minds of the public much as the allies had done with Tobruk, Guadalcanal or Kokoda .
Operation Barbarossa "was" WW2, the other theatres were sideshows in comparison, for example Romania suffered almost as many casualties as the U.S.A and U.K combined and the Russian and German losses were utterly staggering.
Hitler kicked a hornet's nest and paid the price, his intelligence services estimated the Soviet military strength at 30 divisions when it was closer to 300 and they had no idea of the massive industrial capacity available to Stalin or what total mobilisation of the Soviet economy could achieve.
ISIS on the other hand are guerillas fighting within populations which are largely sympathetic to their goals or who at least stay out of their way, the Germans lost somewhere in the order of half a million men to partisan activity but ISIS are able to recruit willing fighters from their captured zones.

But here's a dreadfully depressing thought: sooner or later, there may be a major response against ISIS and Salafism from 'ordinary' Muslims, BUT not necessarily in a progressive way. Reaction may come in ways that are even more reactionary, backward, and insular/parochial than ISIS can manage, harking back to a mythical past. Not so much Islamist fascism, more as a sort of cultural Arabist tribal fascism.

Maybe the only hope for anything progressive in the Middle East, moving towards Enlightenment thinking (equality, the rule of law, rationality, scepticism), will come from women rather than men (especially educated women), non-Arabs (Kurds, especially), Shia rather than Sunni, and Middle East Christians rather than Muslims.

The Marxist still in me says that, since there isn't any real working class, or industrialisation on a large scale across the Middle East, the class structure is dominated by peasants, petty-bourgeois and bureaucrats, and there isn't much progressive in that lot.

So yeah, maybe this will be a much more complicated, to-and-fro see-saw between secular dictatorships and reversion to Islamism, throughout this century ?

So depressing.

Joe,
Assad is the last of the Arab fascists, that's what Ba'athism was modeled on, it's Arabic social nationalism.
As I said before, ISIS are telling the truth about their Jihad and the Atlanticists are lying about it, Islamic movements have always adapted to the zeitgeist and adopted the technology and social structure of the era, they're not medieval at all, they're as much a product of western liberalism as they are Sunni Islam.
Young people raised in the West with Californian culture and given a liberal education are a good fit for ISIS because the recruits see a social justice movement at one level with messianic preachers sending out a consistent message and a street gang with "homies" and big guns at another.
In the Californian vernacular ISIS are "Badassss Motherf-ers"

Jay,

I don't think Assad is the last of Middle Eastern fascist dictators by any means, there's plenty more to come, perhaps some as yet unborn, and I'm not so sure that the Islamo-fascists are a product of anything in the West so much as exploiters of communications and military technology developed there.

It's going to be a long war, or series of wars. I wonder if Fukuyama wants to revise his notion of an 'end of history'.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/562720/Battle-of-Stalingrad

"Russians consider it to be the greatest battle of their Great Patriotic War, and most historians consider it to be the greatest battle of the entire conflict. It stopped the German advance into the Soviet Union and marked the turning of the tide of war in favour of the Allies."

About 3,000-4,000 jihadists - backed by tanks - are fighting in Kobani, i.e. somewhere between 10% and 15% of ISIS's entire fighting capability, and considering that ISIS's losses are about 1000. This battle for the small city of Kobani is chewing up disproportionate resources for its size.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

http://www.firstpost.com/world/top-us-envoy-says-islamic-state-impaled-gathering-kobane-1813447.html

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has "impaled itself" on Kobane by pouring fighters into the strategic Syrian town so they can be bombed by the US-led coalition, a senior US envoy said Nov. 20.

Retired General John Allen, coordinator of the coalition against ISIL in Iraq and Syria, told Turkey's Milliyet newspaper an estimated 600 ISIL fighters had already been killed in air strikes and the group would ultimately be defeated in the battle for the town.

"ISIL has in so many ways impaled itself on Kobane," said Allen.
He said that IS had sought to make a symbol out of Kobane by defeating the Kurdish forces seeking to retain control of the town.

ISIL continues to "pour fighters" into Kobane who can then be bombed by coalition war planes. Any time you mass to achieve the affect that they are trying to achieve with respect to Kobane, you create targets.