From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbarale. This is The Daily.

Today, its de facto capital is falling.

Its territory has shriveled from the size of a small country to just a handful of outposts.

Its surviving leaders are on the run, and its members are surrendering.

Is ISIS losing its war or starting a new one?

It's Thursday, October 19th.

Rod, tell me about the military base you visited recently in Iraq.

Well, it's in town called Divas, which is in northern Iraq.

Rod, Nordland, is the Kabul bureau chief for the times.

It was actually an intelligence base. It was the Kurdish government's equivalent of the CIA.

Just to be clear, the Kurdish government is one of the factions that governs Iraq.

And the Kurds are an ethnic minority there, right?

Right. They have a base there that they use for processing usually refugees.

And what's been bringing these refugees to this base?

In this case, there was a battle in the town of Hawija.

The fighting still rages in a pocket to the north and east of the town where the militants are reportedly surrounded.

The Americans were bombing the place massively, which they hadn't done before.

And the Iraqi army had finally attacked it, and they were advancing very quickly, much more quickly than anybody expected them to.

In fact, there was very little resistance that appeared.

Iraqi forces celebrate coming a step closer to eradicating Islamic states.

And people just began fleeing, and they fled toward Kurdish lines and ended up in this processing center.

They were brought in by trucks.

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