There are several important, although conditional, gains against ISIS in the last few days.
The most dramatic was the retaking of Sinjar by the Iraqi Kurds.

The Kurdish fighters that entered Sinjar, waving flags and getting into occasional gunfights, were seeking to sever a key Islamic State supply line linking militant strongholds in Syria and Iraq. By Friday afternoon, the fighters were firing celebratory rifle shots in the air.

Besides the obvious symbolism (i.e. this is the location of the Yazidi massacre), the importance of this victory can be clearly seen on a map. The primary road between Mosul and Raqqa has now been cut.

While that's great news, the advances of the Iraqi Kurds against ISIS have probably come to an end.

Iraq’s Kurds loathe ISIS, but they also have their own priorities, which do not necessarily mirror those of the United States or even the Iraqi government. Don’t expect this Kurdish offensive to go much beyond Sinjar itself...
For the Kurds, the new reality has amounted to a paradox: leaders in both Baghdad and Washington want the Kurds to fight ISIS, but the Kurds themselves mostly just want to secure Iraq’s Kurdish areas.

There is another reason why the Kurds won't be moving south - because they will run into the Shia militias from Baghdad.

Clashes between Iraqi Kurdish and Shiite fighters north of Baghdad killed seven people Thursday, an official said, illustrating major fault lines between ostensible allies against the ISIS militant group.

Much further south, Iraqi Shia forces have finally managed to surround Ramadi.
However, that needs to be put into context. It took Iraqi forces more than three months just to surround the city. Now comes the hard part. Ramadi has tens of thousands of civilians in it, so an artillery bombardment like what happened to Tikrit in May is probably out of the question. A major urban assault is likely to be long and bloody.

Probably the best news in the War on ISIS is a certain lack of news: It's been months since ISIS has managed a significant offensive in Iraq. They are clearly on their heels and slowly losing ground.
In Syria, where ISIS has been more active, the Russian-backed Syrian government offensive has managed to break the ISIS siege of a strategic airfield.

The war against ISIS is going much better than it appeared as recently as April.
So then why did General John Allen (Ret.), Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, say this?

“If we don’t get at those issues over the long term, not just be compelled to constantly be fighting the symptoms of the problems, which is al Qaeda and which is Daesh - if we don’t get to the left of those symptoms and try to solve these underlying circumstances, working collaboratively with those who are in the region, who best understand the region, then we’re going to be condemned to fight forever.”

While General Allen doesn't list those long-term issues, a few of them are easy to guess.
However, merely voicing those issues leads one to directly contradicting both the war strategy and political rhetoric used by both political parties and the news media for the last decade.
And it all hinges on a single word: terrorism.

On the other hand, the Islamic State has a record of taking and holding territory, controlling populations, even governing at the local level – just like a classic insurgent group. Its fighters swept into the Sunni areas of western Iraq on a wave of popular disaffection with the central government and have filled the vacuum left by the retreat of the Iraqi state and its security forces....
These are not the activities of a shadowy terrorist network, but a semi-overt insurgency bent on mobilizing the population against the government. Terrorist groups by most definitions do not seek control over territory and populations. They operate in secret, keep their distance from society and rarely depend on popular support for their survival.
The administration’s counterterrorism strategy in the borderlands of Pakistan, focused on raids and drone strikes, proved effective in part because the target was a small network of individuals, many of them outsiders with little support among the population. It was possible to pick off members of al-Qaeda in Pakistan one by one until the network was nearly decimated.
An insurgency with tens of thousands of fighters poses an altogether different challenge. Air strikes will take their toll but will barely dent the organization’s fighting power. Over time, its members will learn to avoid moving in convoys and congregating in large numbers and will seek the cover of urban areas and civilian populations – making air strikes increasingly difficult and risky.

That's the key issue here. We are using counter-terrorism tactics designed to defeat a "group", but everything ISIS does resembles an insurgency or rebellion. We've got the entire game plan wrong.
Just look at the slow assault on Ramadi.

"We trained and built a counter-insurgency [Iraqi] army, and this is much more of a conventional fight" against the defenses thrown up by ISIS, Army Col. Steve Warren, a spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, said in a briefing to the Pentagon from Baghdad last month...
ISIS has thrown up defensive belts around Ramadi, using remotely controlled improvised explosive devices much like minefields, and taking up defensive positions to cover the IEDs with fields of fire, Warren said.

There is no way, no way at all, that you can use counter-terrorism tactics in a conventional war and expect to win.
So why doesn't the Obama Administration switch to a more appropriate strategy and use more accurate terminology?
If I was to guess, it's because it would naturally raise questions that the Obama Administration doesn't want to answer.

Fighting terrorism means just killing a few bad guys.
Fighting an insurgency implies that there are outstanding political issues involved.

Fighting a rebellion in a conventional war means that we've chosen a side in a civil war (which is what we've done) and that sounds messy and complicated. Nothing at all like just "killing terrorists".
It also sounds a lot like the mess Bush got us into in Iraq, but even worse. In other words, reality is political poison, so we are going to stick with the sure-loser of a fantasy.

That's not to say that it has to be this way. Obama promoted the Taliban earlier this year.

"The Taliban is an armed insurgency, ISIL is a terrorist group," Schultz said. "So, we don't make concessions to terrorist groups."

The Obama Administration is trapped by its own rhetoric.
If this is a full-scale rebellion then negotiation is necessary. Otherwise this rebellion will drag out year after year like our conflict with the Taliban has, and then flare up again in some other form in the near future.
Now some may say that there is no way we can negotiate with ISIS, but then people said the same thing about the Taliban 10 years ago.