No preview of 2015 in the “mainstream” media has been complete without hand-wringing references to Islamic State (Isis). 

Western political leaders profess their desperation to rid the Middle East — and indeed the world — of this barbaric scourge. 

Their allies among the royalist dictatorships in the region claim to share this same goal.

Yet after a year of mounting condemnation and five months of air strikes against Isis forces in Iraq and Syria, US-led military intervention has failed to roll back the militant group from large swathes of those two countries. 

At best they have helped slow the Isis advance on Baghdad and enabled the heroic Kurdish militias to defend towns and villages such as Kobane. 

But the Sunni fundamentalists and their ex-Ba’athist allies continue to exercise their brutal dictatorship over as many as eight million people, or at least those it has not already slaughtered in the cities of Mosul and Raqqa. 

They are on the verge of spreading their perverse doctrine into Lebanon, where the world’s failure to help support Syrian and Palestinian refugees has intensified that country’s instability. 

In the teeth of all this, Western politicians and media pundits now predict that military action, together with falling oil revenues and deteriorating social conditions, will eventually lead to the collapse of the Isis caliphate. 

However, the reality is that much of its lavish funding still comes in dollars from high-up supporters in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, however much the latter deny it.

Reports from Mosul and elsewhere indicate that Isis’s infrastructure not only remains intact but is actually expanding and being consolidated. All manifestations of discontent or opposition are ruthlessly suppressed. 

US President Barack Obama declared Operation Inherent Resolve to defeat Isis to be a “long-term project,” while Secretary of State John Kerry later told the Nato summit in Newport that the job should take no more than three years. 

Such statements only strengthen the suspicion that the continued existence of Isis rather suits US policy to re-establish its own military presence in Iraq, strengthen the pro-Western rebels in Syria and exert pressure on the non-Sunni theocracy in Iran through its allies in the Iraqi government.  

Whichever timetable is preferred in the White House or the Pentagon, Isis’s subjects should not be condemned to savage servitude for a day longer than is unavoidable. 

This is especially true for women, girls and members of non-Sunni Muslim religious minorities. 

Their vile treatment at the hands of Isis barbarians is a stain on humanity that must be expunged without delay. Foreign jihadists who join Isis are colluding in the systematic enslavement and rape of women and children and the genocidal murder of so-called “heretics.” For that, they will have to be held to account.

Instead of complacency, big talk and pipe-dreams, Western leaders must now prove their commitment to the elimination Isis without further delay.

In place of US-Nato unilateral intervention with a cynical agenda, all military measures in the region should be directed under the aegis of the United Nations, involving China and Russia. 

Nato member Turkey should be compelled to stop the infiltration of foreign jihadists into Syria and instead open its borders to anti-Isis fighters from Kurdistan and elsewhere. 

The Arab dictatorships should face sanctions if they continue to fund Sunni fundamentalists in Iraq and Syria.

And the al-Assad regime in Damascus should be treated as a vital ally in the fight against Isis, not as an enemy to be undermined and overthrown.