The Manbij Pocket is the most important strategic point in the entire war against ISIS, and this Defense Department graphic makes it perfectly clear why.

Without the Manbij Pocket and the porous Turkish border, the caliphate is cut off from the rest of the world.
No new funding.
No new fighters to replace those who are killed.
No new ammo and weapons.
Basically, the ISIS caliphate without the Manbij Pocket is a dead man walking.

That's why this news is so important.

U.S.-backed fighters on Thursday closed all major roads leading to the northern Syrian town of Manbij, a stronghold of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and surrounded it from three sides, officials and Syrian opposition activists said.
Manbij is a waypoint on an ISIS supply line between the Turkish border and the extremist group's de facto capital, Raqqa. If the U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces capture Manbij, it will be the extremists' biggest defeat in Syria since government forces captured the central historic town of Palmyra in March.

Manbij does not equal the Manbij Pocket, but it does mean all the major roads. Without Manbij, ISIS would be left with an increasingly shrinking gap and vulnerable backroads.
Here's an active map.

ISIS is also being beaten back in Sirte, it's Libyan stronghold.

He said troops were on the fringes of residential areas in the city centre, but sniper fire and explosive devices planted by IS were slowing down the advance.
Sirte is IS's most significant stronghold outside Iraq and Syria. It is also IS's most valuable asset inside oil-rich Libya.
Local militias affiliated to al-Qaeda in April pushed IS forces out of their other base in the eastern city of Derna.

Militias are predicting Sirte to fall in weeks.
On the other end of the caliphate, Iraqi forces are penetrating ISIS-controlled Fallujah.
However, all is not well. Humanitarian funding is running out just as the city is destroyed.
And then it gets worse.

Human Rights Watch, however, has received credible allegations of summary executions, beatings of unarmed men, enforced disappearances, and mutilation of corpses by government forces over the two weeks of fighting, mostly on the outskirts of the city, since May 23....
Three of those interviewed confirmed the account that a survivor gave on Tigris (Dijla) Channel television that a group consisting of Federal Police and PMF had separated men from women, marched the men to where the troops’ officers were, lined them up, and shot at least 17 of them, including one teenage boy.