The only way that using force against jihadis creates more jihadis is when ineffective force is used against them. Hit them hard enough to enrage them but lightly enough to leave them mostly unhurt and yes, you will create more jihadis. That is stupid.
But kill them is such large numbers that even God appears to have forsaken them and they can be beaten. Iraq did that in the Iran-Iraq War and we did that in the surge offensive in Iraq.
Turkey did that too, and the effects are still being felt:
The Turks have been dealing (often using great brutality) with murderous Arabs for centuries and the Arabs remember all that. As a result ISIL does not make any effort to expand into Turkey. For the Turks, their ugly treatment of Arabs in the past is still useful because many Arabs fear that the Turks would go all old school on them if sufficiently provoked.
It has been a long time since Turkey ruled large chunks of the Arab world in their empire, but the memory lingers on.
As an aside, why does the West get so much grief for a much shorter period of running Arab states as colonies but Turkey gets a pass?
Mind you, I'm not calling for the level of brutality that the Ottoman Turks inflicted on all Arabs and not just jihadis in order to convince Arab Moslems to reject the jihadis who would fight the Turks. But killing jihadis is certainly the way to go these days.
Kill jihadis. Keep killing them. And chase them when they run to kill more of them.
Then, perhaps the majority of non-jihadi Moslems can turn against the survivors to destroy the ideology that keeps providing new recruits over the centuries.
