Western support has helped Iraq's Kurdish troops regain ground and momentum against the Islamic State group, but retaking the northern jihadist hub of Mosul remains too big an ask for now.
On June 10, the jihadists who already controlled parts of Syria overran Mosul, Iraq's second city, and swept across the country's Sunni Arab heartland virtually unopposed.
When federal forces buckled as jihadists advanced, the Kurds seized long-coveted territory around Mosul. But in August, they suffered setbacks of their own when IS surged again.
Air support from the US and France, arms deliveries and improved ties with Baghdad have allowed the Kurdish peshmerga fighters to regroup and take the initiative.
Speaking at an international conference in Paris last week, Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari even predicted it would "not be too difficult" to retake Mosul.
However Roz Nuri Shaways, Iraq's newly-appointed finance minister and a peshmerga commander whose forces recaptured seven Christian villages from IS last week, admitted Mosul was too ambitious an objective in the short term.
"We need real co-operation from the international community" to reclaim Mosul, a city which had a population of close to two million before its capture by the jihadists, he said.
It was in Mosul, in July, that IS supremo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi made his only public appearance since becoming the region's top jihadist, and the city is seen as the place where the war against IS in Iraq will be lost or won.
"I have felt so relieved since the news that air strikes in Syria and Iraq had started," said Saad Mahmud, a 34-year-old Mosul taxi driver.
"We have had a taste of the horror and hope that the raids will go all the way, to teach a lesson to anyone who is prepared to support those criminals," he said.
US and French jets have been carrying out air strikes nearly all around Mosul but they are powerless to smoke IS militants out of their urban hideouts.
"The peshmerga cannot take Arab Mosul, and Baghdad doesn't have the force to do it alone," said Kirk Sowell, the publisher of the Inside Iraqi Politics newsletter, adding: "US airpower is irrelevant to that battle."
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