Daesh(ISIS) fighters near Raqqa, the de-facto ISIS capitol, received the shock of their lives last night when U.S. military helicopters airlifted hundreds of the best-trained fighters of the Syrian Kurdish-Arab-Assyrian coalition, the SDF, across Lake Assad and smack dab into the thick of things in ISIS-held territory. In the previous weeks, SDF advances north of the Euphrates, around 50 to 60 km east of the Tabqa Dam, had forced Daesh to send many fighters to defend the front far away from Tabqa, so they were ill-prepared for this daring operation that they likely did not think the SDF were even capable of. Then, when Daesh was in disarray because of the air assault to their rear, SDF elite units, supported by U.S. Special forces, assaulted Daesh at the Tabqa Dam from the north. And now, according to Kurdish sources, the Tabqah Dam has been liberated.
This is a huge blow to ISIS, as it not only cuts them off from the westward Raqqa-Aleppo road, but also increasingly closes the circle being drawn around them by the SDF in Raqqa. ISIS had also been threatening to destroy the dam, which would cause a massive flood that would in turn kill tens of thousands and create a tremendous catastrophe both for millions of people dependent on water from Lake Assad and electricity from the Tabqa Dam.
When one considers that ISIS had taken over nearly the entire region, except for parts of Kobane City, to the north, when President Obama chose to send in the U.S. Air Force to support the Kurds in October of 2014, the current situation is a tremendously positive development for the Syrian Kurds and their secular Arab and Assyrian allies and a terribly negative development for ISIS, which is getting inexorably closer to collapse as a military force in Iraq and Syria. It also demonstrates that relying on secular, progressive local ground forces is a much better strategy for defeating ISIS than sending in a bunch of combat troops.
Last but not least, this operation was planned by the SDF, which has numerous brilliant female tacticians in top command positions… Being outsmarted and outplanned by women really must hurt when a major premise in your ideology is that women are infinitely inferior to men.