Hard to tell.
Yesterday, some plonker on twitter said that the Turkish army finally entered al-Bab, so I posted the news here. Later on, it turned out the news was fake.
It's really hard to tell what's going on in al-Bab right now.
Turkey claims to have killed at least 1000 ISIS fighters since the start of the Euphrates Shield operations. I personally think this number is exaggerated.
In my opinion, ISIS has probably lost only a couple of hundred fighters since August 2016.
You have to bear in mind that most of the battles so far have consisted of only several dozen fighters on both sides. The war against ISIS remains a low intensity conflict, even on the Kurdish and Iraqi fronts.
Turkey will eventually capture al-Bab, in my opinion, so nobody should really be worried about that.
The question is what comes after al-Bab's liberation. Will Turkey hand the city over to the Russians and Syrian regime forces, or will Turkey annex it or turn the Azaz-Jarabulus corridor into some sort of a Turkmen autonomous region? Nobody knows for sure.
A more important issue is how will ISIS react against Turkey's eventual takeover of al-Bab? The thing about ISIS is that it is continuing to successfully launch suicide attacks in places that are currently held by Turkish troops in northern Syria. Just a few days ago, at least 12 FSA fighters were killed in Sawran by an ISIS VBIED.
That's the real challenge that Turkey faces. ISIS's goal is to continue destabilizing the territories held by its opponents until they're weak and exhausted enough to collapse. After all, this is how ISIS took over Anbar province and Mosul in the first place. It carried out so many VBIED attacks over the course of 3-4 years until the Iraqi army and local governments finally collapsed and paved way for an ISIS takeover in these areas.
The problem with these Salafi-jihadist groups is that they have a lot of sleeper cells and covert followers.
Turkey must sever its ties with all Islamist groups in Syria because none of them are trustworthy. A lot of them have ISIS sleeper agents.