Since the fall of its capital, Raqqa, in October, and subsequent defeats in eastern Syria, Islamic State (IS) has appeared on the brink of defeat. Yet, in the past two weeks, IS has conducted successful attacks in both the eastern province of Deir Ezzour and on the outskirts of Damascus itself, seizing territory and even an oilfield. Sirwan Kajjo comments:

Since Turkey, a NATO member, launched its Afrin offensive against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG)—a main U.S. ally in the fight against IS—U.S. officials have been warning that the fighting between two U.S. allies is distracting from the main mission, which is defeating IS. . . . The U.S. State Department is already convinced that the terror group has been rebuilding itself in some places in Syria. . . .

The Turkish-led attack on Afrin has forced more than 2,000 Kurdish and Arab fighters deployed against IS frontlines in eastern Syria to withdraw in order to defend the area. U.S. officials have voiced concerns that such changes in battlefield priorities would take pressure off IS, thus allowing the extremists to regroup and re-strategize their attacking capabilities along the Euphrates River Valley. More Kurdish fighters are expected to pull back from the battle against IS as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has threatened to invade more Syrian Kurdish-held areas after Afrin. . . .

IS still controls around 5 percent of Syria’s territory, particularly in the east and pockets near Damascus. In the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in southern Damascus, IS enjoys a rising popularity among local residents. The group also maintains a significant presence near the Israeli border, where it has at least one dangerous affiliate, the Khalid bin al-Walid Army. Around 1,500 IS militants are estimated to be present across Syria, some of them moving about mostly freely as the U.S.-led air campaign has significantly decreased, especially after the liberation of Raqqa.

IS as we knew it may not exist anymore, but it can certainly morph into an insurgency and attempt to reestablish itself in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa, while still using war-ravaged Syria as its command center. . . . The longer the stalemate drags on in Syria, the better it is for IS—and other terrorist groups, for that matter—to feed off the chaos and to continue posing a danger to regional and global security.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.