The Islamic State  efforts to expand the territorial battlefield are signs not of its growing strength but rather that, currently, it is literally losing ground: Iraqi government forces are slowly whittling away the group's control of territory around Ramadi. As an analysis in The Atlantic concluded earlier this fall, the Islamic State group's "territory" really amounts only to "a tattered patchwork of infrastructure and cities," and both public and (less-disputed) private estimates show the group losing territory overall. Perhaps the most favorable assessment of its territorial status frames the would-be state as sacrificing ground in three major strongholds "that were hard for it to maintain" in return for "holdings in central Syria that will be much easier." No one seriously believes that such a "state" can survive military confrontation with global powers from Washington to Moscow and regional foes from Istanbul to Tehran. The Islamic State group's moves into Libya and, now, Afghanistan, thus can best be seen not as an enlargement of the Islamic State's geographical control but as a continuing territorial retreat to the failed states providing the only environments where it can survive.