We're not winning - today's edition

The West is gaining no traction at all against the most immediate threat among its jihadist enemies.

The Department of Defense estimated on Wednesday that the Islamic State currently has 20,000 to 30,000 members in Iraq and Syria, which means the jihadist group that controls swaths of land in both countries has suffered no appreciable net loss of fighters since President Obama first ordered U.S. airstrikes in August 2014.

Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, the name of America’s military intervention against ISIS, gave the official figures during a press conference at the Pentagon.

A reporter asked Warren for the military’s best estimate “on the size of the ISIS fighting force across Iraq and Syria.”

“We estimate there’s between 20,000 and 30,000 members of [ISIS] operating inside both Iraq and Syria,” Warren said in response.

The CIA assessed in September 2014, about a month after the U.S. began conducting airstrikes against ISIS, that the group had between 20,000 and 31,500 members across Iraq and Syria, indicating American military efforts have done little to degrade its manpower.

The Obama administration has touted how the U.S.-led coalition has killed tens of thousands of ISIS fighters, with one official saying last fall that 20,000 members were killed in just over a year of operations. The president himself said last month that the U.S. is hammering the jihadists “harder than ever” and has fervently defended his strategy to counter the Islamic State amid growing bipartisan calls for him to use more military force and take a tougher posture toward the conflict.

A primary reason ISIS has retained its numbers despite an international effort to defeat it is the foreign fighters that have traveled to Iraq and Syria to fight for the jihadist group and spread its self-declared caliphate. For each ISIS member killed, there is another recruit arriving to replace them.

So it's still attractive to some kind of person. Thousands of such persons, actually.