From Baghdad to Beirut, a growing backlash against the most extreme of the jihadists may change the course of civil wars in Syria and Iraq

IN A region of opaque politics and oddly named actors, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) lives up to its title. The group that started as an al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq has prospered there since the Americans left in 2011, subduing much of the rural, Sunni-dominated north and pursuing an aggressive terror campaign against Shias further south. ISIS expanded into Syria in April last year; al-Sham denotes a Greater Syria encompassing—among swathes of what was the fertile crescent—Lebanon, Palestine and even Jordan. Better armed and financed, it has encroached steadily into areas freed from government control by other rebel groups, enforcing harsh, state-like authority along the Euphrates valley and across much of the north. But the group’s rapid rise may now be over.

Today ISIS’s fighters, who include as many as 7,000 would-be jihadists from across the globe, face battles on three fronts. In Syria a wave of disgruntlement with the group turned into a tsunami after December 31st when its men returned the torture-marked corpse of a doctor-cum-commander with Ahrar al-Sham, a Salafist rebel group which had hitherto been an ally. A final provocation came when ISIS abducted five employees of Médecins Sans Frontières, a French-founded charity that is one of the few aid organisations still willing to work inside Syria.

Since then, rebels of all stripes, including al-Qaeda’s slightly milder Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, other Islamist brigades and moderate Western-backed groups known as the Free Syrian Army, have joined forces, rapidly sweeping ISIS from strongholds across a swathe of northern Syria. In Raqqa, the biggest town wholly controlled by the opposition, most recently by ISIS, its fighters are now said to be holding out in a single building. The group is also said to have lost all but one of the border crossings to Turkey it once held, as well as its headquarters in the rebel-held half of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city.

ISIS is also under fire in neighbouring Iraq. Exploiting the simmering resentment among minority Sunnis in the country’s north and west against the Shia-dominated Iraqi government in Baghdad, ISIS on January 3rd seized parts of Falluja and Ramadi, the main cities of Anbar province, which abuts Syria (see our map). But this bold move may have played into the hands of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki. Despite a year of unrest in Sunni areas and an intensified campaign of al-Qaeda bombs, Mr Maliki has shied so far from sending his Shia-dominated army into full-on combat. Now he has an excuse, as well as support from America which has promised to speed up its arms supplies, and also from remnants of the Sahwa, or awakening, a movement of Sunni tribesmen who turned against al-Qaeda to fight alongside the Americans in 2008. In anticipation of an army assault on Falluja, some 13,000 families have fled the city, says the Iraqi Red Crescent. ISIS may have spread itself too thin by moving fighters from Syria to Iraq. Yet, if some reports prove credible, the group has opened a third Levantine front—in Lebanon. In unverified recordings, ISIS claimed responsibility for a car bomb on January 2nd which targeted loyalists to Hizbullah, the Shia movement that backs Syria’s regime. This was the latest in a growing list of tit-for-tat exchanges between Lebanese groups aligned with opposing sides in Syria’s civil war.

As horrid as each other

Weakened central control in Syria and Iraq has opened space for ISIS’s brand of extremism, and the sectarian politics of both Mr Maliki and Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime have prompted some hapless Sunnis to embrace the group. And yet few actually agree with its radical ideas. Unlike other Syrian rebels, ISIS had its sights set not on capturing the capital, Damascus, but on creating its own Islamic state in the area between eastern Syria and north and western Iraq.

ISIS’s methods, as well as its reliance on foreign fighters, are also unpopular. Even al-Qaeda’s chief, Ayman Zawahiri, has criticised ISIS’s indiscriminate attacks against Shias as well as moderate Sunnis. Its imprisonment of scores of aid workers and journalists, as well as Syrian activists and minority Kurds, Christians and Alawites, has tarnished the rebel movement as a whole, frightening off the foreign press and would-be providers of aid, especially from Western countries. The hostages may be held as an insurance policy against imagined future Western drone strikes or other military actions. But many Syrians unsurprisingly regard the tactic as evidence that ISIS, despite its fighting prowess, has thereby bolstered the regime, if it is not actively colluding with it.

Jabhat al-Nusra, its al-Qaeda-linked rival, has offered to call off clashes if ISIS works under a joint sharia court. But ISIS seems unlikely to back down. On January 6th it killed 50 people before surrendering its Aleppo base; it has set off car bombs there and elsewhere, too. Its spokesman declared on January 8th that ISIS fighters were “hungry lions who drink blood and eat bones, finding nothing tastier than the blood of Sahwa”, a gibe that is particularly insulting to other jihadist groups.

A successful containment of ISIS would drastically change the dynamic in both Syria and Iraq. The group has assiduously worked to worsen the sectarian bitterness sweeping the region between Islam’s two main sects. In Syria Mr Assad has used ISIS to scare Western powers into viewing him as the least bad option for Syria, with policy altering accordingly. In Iraq the group has helped to make 2013 the bloodiest year since 2008.

The clashes have also shown that there is life in some of the moderate rebels who were only recently considered a spent force. Two emergent coalitions, the Syrian Revolutionaries’ Front and al-Mujahideen, are now fighting alongside the more devout Islamist Front and Jabhat al-Nusra. Some groups engaged against ISIS appear to be backed by Saudi Arabia, an indication that ISIS may face foes increasingly well armed and financed.

But it would take a concerted effort to defeat ISIS’s militias in Iraq or Syria. Syria’s rebels are united by little more than shared dislike for ISIS. The West has become warier of getting involved in the region. As France’s war in Mali shows, military action tends to suppress rather than eradicate groups benefiting from a power vacuum across the region. But for the first time in many months, most Syrians feel united in satisfaction. “It’s early days,” says a cheered rebel commander in the Turkish city of Antakya, near Syria’s border. “But this is good news.”