A person who I regard as the best political analyst on Syria, a man called Mahmoud Mousa, who works with the foreign media in Syria and comes politically from the circle of the moderate rebels and civilian Syrian opposition, said to me when I visited Syria in May that there are only three serious forces in Syria today: ISIS, the regime and the Kurds – this tells you a lot about the state of the other forces touted as potential partners for the West. Of the three serious forces, two of them – ISIS and the Kurds – have been engaged in a war for territory in the course of just over a year and a half.

I would argue that this is a war between successor entities. The Syrian state has effectively ceased to exist as a coherent governing entity; what still calls itself the Syrian state (Bashar Assad and his various allies) should better be seen today as only one of a number of successor entities fighting over the corpse of what was once Syria.

This is better understood as a war of ground and resources, rather than as a war over forms of governance for some notional future united Syria – which will probably never emerge. Once one understands the ISIS-Kurdish war in that way, it begins to make obvious sense – obvious geographic sense first of all. What you have in the case of the Kurdish successor entity and the ISIS (or Sunni Islamist) successor entity is a natural collision in geographic terms. The Kurdish entity is organised east to west, in three separate enclaves along the Syrian-Turkish border: the Jazira enclave, stretching from the Iraqi-Syrian border across the northern part, a gap under rebel control, then the Kobani enclave in the middle, and further to the west the town of Afrin.

The ISIS enclave is organised from south east to north west, stretching deeply into Iraq, taking Raqqa and Deir ez-Zur provinces as its heartland and stretching up towards Aleppo province. These two entities, by their very nature, collide with one another and must – out of necessity – fight over borders, in order to get access to resources.

Why is the Kobani enclave so important and formed the main centre of clashes? It is a Kurdish controlled enclave which sticks like a knife into the heart of the ISIS entity. It stops ISIS from being able to move forces from its capital in Raqqa city to Aleppo province where it would like to, which means they have to drive the long way round. ISIS is therefore determined – for geopolitical rather than ideological or ethnic reasons – to wipe out this Kurdish enclave and to have a much more contiguous area of territory from the Syrian-Turkish and across to the Syrian-Iraqi border in the east.

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