A month ago I wrote that the Islamic State (IS or ISIS) is now the only game in town when it comes to insurgents fighting against the Syrian (and now also Iraqi) state:

In a few month the Islamic Front will no longer exist. It will vanish like that phantasy of a Free Syrian Army. Parts of it will swear allegiance to the Islamic State, parts will give up fighting and parts will change over to the government side. Then the real war against ISIS will start.

The "moderate rebels" Washington has been searching for for years are a unicorn. Whomever the U.S. gave weapons to and trained in Jordan and Turkey is now part of ISIS.

The Islamic State consolidates itself (recommended) in west Iraq and across the east and north of Syria:

The frontiers of the new Caliphate declared by Isis on 29 June are expanding by the day and now cover an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people, a population larger than that of Denmark, Finland or Ireland. In a few weeks of fighting in Syria Isis has established itself as the dominant force in the Syrian opposition, …

By now IS generates enough money from oil sales and blackmail to support itself. It has taken an immense haul of weapons from four Iraqi divisions and now also from the Syrian Brigade 93 which it defeated a week ago:

In addition to 5+ 122mm D-30 howitzers, the IS captured approx. 20 T-55 tanks & 1 ZSU-23-4 Shilka SPAAG

Note: The haul in Iraq was much, much bigger than this one.

The Islamic State has enough experienced soldiers to handle these weapons. How good its logistics are run though is an open questions. Those may eventually turn out to be its weak point.

The Islamic State also gained in numbers. Even the ardent promoter of the non-existent Syrian Free Army Hassan Hassan now admits that all these folks are under IS control. International forces so far aligned with Al-Qaeda are moving over to IS. Tribes in the newly captured areas pledge allegiance to the Islamic State and add to its forces.

One military expert says:

ISIL has now progressed from local victories to a regional strategy. They have moved from what is referred to in Counterinsurgency warfare as Phase II to Phase III operations, or transformation from fixed covert insurgency to an overt war of mobility. This is when a terrorist group grows strong enough to come out of the shadows to transform into a mobile “liberation army”.

Colonel Pat Lang remarks:

Today I am told that DoD has decided that the IS force is the most capable non-Israeli army in the ME. pl

IS has lots of light and heavy weapons, it has money, it is led by experienced senior officers from Saddam's old army and it has a large force of indoctrinated foot soldiers. What is it going to do with these capabilities?

In his speech declaring the Caliphate Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi promised to do something big. He needs a big event to consolidate his position. The former Saddam officers aligned with IS want to capture Baghdad and regain their old status. The current attack against the Kurdish Erbil is not the big one but just a sideshow. Baghdadi wants to eliminate it as a U.S. position that could otherwise be used to attack his back. As Pat Land sees it:

When they are done in the north they will return to the problem of eliminating the present Iraqi government. I doubt if they plan to occupy the Shia south of Iraq but the destruction of what remains of Iraqi government central authority is certainly possible.

If they succeed in doing that much, Jordan, Lebanon and the Gulf will beckon.

But over the last weeks the Islamic State also consolidated its position in Syria and connected the two battlefields into one.

Elijah J Magnier, a Middle East analyst and journalist with excellent sources, suggests a different target for the big attack as storyfied here. Excerpts:

Hundreds of tanks & sophisticated anti-air artillery gained from #Iraq & #Syria are gathering for a spectacular attack Baghdadi promised.
…
2my mind, #IS is pulling z attention on #Iraq 2hit harder in #Syria, knowingly that a) #SAA & #Assad would attract less interntionl help

Magnier suggests that the Islamic State will run a spectacular attack on Aleppo and will probably capture the city. He is right to believe that – should the Islamic State use its full force – the weakened Syrian army will have little chance to hold this important city. The result would be a huge bloodbath.

While the U.S. would probably try to stop an attack on Baghdad, though impossible with a few pinprick airstrikes, it is unlikely that any international help would come to counter an attack on Aleppo. Patrick Cockburn concurs:

Isis may well advance on Aleppo in preference to Baghdad: it’s a softer target and one less likely to provoke international intervention. This will leave the West and its regional allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – with a quandary: their official policy is to get rid of Assad, but Isis is now the second strongest military force in Syria; if he falls, it’s in a good position to fill the vacuum. Like the Shia leaders in Baghdad, the US and its allies have responded to the rise of Isis by descending into fantasy.

In my view the Islamic State is at its core a genocidal and extremely dangerous force that should be defeated by all means as soon as possible. There are now believable claims that it just killed or buried alive some 500 Yazidi. This isn't its first or last massacre it committed. The Islamic State has thereby very different dimensions than the laughing stock Al-Qaeda threat we were told to fear over the last decades. If it has more time to gain additional resources it will become much more difficult to defeat.

Unfortunately, because the threat of the old Al-Qaeda was over-hyped, this new force has little to fear from the "west". Obama promised to only protect Erbil for its oil and for its value as an intelligence base. A few air attacks from a far away carrier can not hold a city against a determined capable force. Erbil may soon fall.

Obama withholds any further weapons or help to the government of Iraq because he wants to blackmail it into some phantasy of "national unity government":

The ongoing strikes, which began Friday, address “immediate” concerns of protecting Americans, besieged minorities and critical infrastructure in the north, Obama said. But comprehensive aid to push back advances by the Sunni Muslim extremists through much of the country over the past two months will require a new Iraqi government, he said.

For the first time I can think of I -in this case- agree with the neocon warmonger John McCain:

Mr. McCain said he would favor sending combat air controllers into Iraq to help identify targets for airstrikes. Heavy military equipment should be rushed into Erbil, the Kurdish capital, the senator said. And he said he believed the airstrikes must extend into ISIS-controlled territory in Syria.

Airstrikes can not win wars and can not take ground away from the Islamic State. Local forces will have to do that. But airstrikes can destroy its heavy weapons and the ammunition depots it captured. The Syrian air-force is too small to achieve this. An Iraqi air-force does not exists. Turkey and Jordan have some capabilities but are either unofficially allied with IS or fear its retribution. The U.S. could run such an air campaign. It would take the U.S. air-force supported by special operation groups on the ground only a few weeks to reduce the Islamic State to an infantry force incapable of larger geographic actions.

But Obama and the people informing him still believe that the Islamic State, which they partially helped to grow, is some cuddly homegrown Al-Qaeda that can be used to further this or that geopolitical phantasy. They are wrong to believe this.