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What are the origins of ISIS?

Political Islam in its modern form, as Mahmoud Mamdani states in Good Muslims, Bad Muslims, is ‘more a domestic product than a foreign import’. It was not, he reminds us, ‘bred in isolation… Political Islam was born in the colonial period. But it did not give rise to a terrorist movement until the Cold War.’ The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was born almost a century ago. Its followers in neighbouring countries contested for power (rarely winning any) with governments across the region. The mobilization against the US-backed Shah in Iran in the 1970s resulted in the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in perhaps the most powerful, self-defined Islamic government of the 20th century. But today’s movement known as political Islam, with its military mobilizations holding pride of place ahead of its political formations, emerged in its first coherent identity with the US-armed, US-paid, Pakistani-trained mujahideen warriors who fought the Soviet troops in Afghanistan from 1979 onwards. Continuing in the post-Vietnam Cold War 1980s, the Afghanistan War ended with the defeat and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.

The specific origins of ISIS, also variously known as ISIL, Daesh or the Islamic State, lie in the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The country was already in terrible shape, following decades of war (the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-89, then the first US Gulf War in 1991) and a dozen years of crippling economic sanctions imposed in 1990. Even after the first wars, and despite brutal repression of any potential opposition and the long-standing political and economic privileging of the large (20 per cent or so) Sunni minority, the majority of Iraqis lived middle-class lives, including government-provided free healthcare and education, with some of the best medical and scientific institutions in the Arab world. The sanctions, imposed in the name of the United Nations but created and enforced by the US, had shredded much of the social fabric of the once-prosperous, secular, cosmopolitan country. The Pentagon’s ‘shock and awe’ bombing campaign that opened the US invasion destroyed much of Iraq’s physical infrastructure, as well as the lives of over 7,000 Iraqi civilians.

How did the 2003 invasion of Iraq affect the growth of ISIS?

Among the first acts of the US-UK occupation were the dissolution of the Iraqi military, the dismantling of the civil service, and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baath Party. All three institutions represented core concentrations of secular nationalist interests in Iraq, and their collapse was part of the reason for the turn toward religious and sectarian identity that began to replace national identity for many Iraqis. At the same time, in all three institutions, particularly at the highest echelons, Sunni Iraqis were more likely to suffer from the loss of income and prestige – since Sunnis held a disproportionate share of top jobs and top positions in the military and the Baath Party. So, right from the beginning, a sectarian strand emerged at the very centre of the rising opposition to the occupation.

Despite the Bush administration’s dismissals of the opposition as nothing but Baathist leftovers and foreign fighters, the Iraqi resistance was far broader. Within months of the March 2003 invasion, militias and informal groups of fighters were challenging the US-UK occupation across the country. One of the earliest was al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI, sometimes known as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni militia created in 2004 by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. He was Jordanian, although it appears most of the early members of AQI were Iraqis. Al-Zarqawi announced publicly that AQI had pledged loyalty to the leadership of al-Qaeda and specifically to Osama bin Laden. The militia’s tactics included bombings and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), as well as reported kidnappings and beheadings. While AQI began with a focus on the US and other coalition forces, aiming to rid Iraq of foreign occupiers, it soon expanded to adopt a more explicitly sectarian agenda, in which the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government, military and police forces as well as Shi’a civilians were also targeted.

Over the next several years, the forces fighting against the occupation of Iraq became more sectarian, moving toward what would become a bloody civil war fought alongside the resistance to occupation. Beginning in 2006, the US shifted its Iraq strategy, deciding to move away from direct fighting against Sunni anti-occupation fighters and instead to try to co-opt them. The essence of the Sunni Awakening plan was that the US would bankroll Sunni tribal leaders, those who had earlier led the anti-US resistance, paying them off to fight with the occupation and US-backed Shi’a-dominated government instead of against them. They would also fight against the Sunni outliers, those who rejected the Awakening movement, which included al-Qaeda in Iraq. And just about the time that the Sunni Awakening was taking hold, al-Qaeda in Iraq changed its name – this time to Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI.

In August 2014, when Iraq’s Anbar province had been largely overrun by ISIS, its governor, Ahmed al-Dulaimi, described for the New York Times the trajectory of an ISIS leader whom al-Dulaimi had taught in military school. ‘It was never clear that he would turn out like that,’ al-Dulaimi told the Times.

‘He was from a simple family, with high morals, but all his brothers went in that direction [becoming jihadists].’ After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, al-Dulaimi’s former pupil joined al-Qaeda in Iraq and was detained by US forces in 2005. According to al-Dulaimi: ‘We continue to live with the consequences of the decision to disband Saddam’s army… All of these guys got religious after 2003… Surely, ISIS benefits from their experience.’

Who is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and what was his role in the rise of ISIS?

In June 2006 al-Zarqawi was killed by US bombs. According to some sources, four months later Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was announced as the new leader of AQI, having been released from 10 months or so in the US-run Bucca prison in Iraq. Other sources claim that al-Baghdadi spent as much as five years in the US prison, and that after the death of al-Zarqawi, AQI was taken over by a different person with a similar name – Abu Omar al-Baghdadi – who may have led the organization until 2010.

However long Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi spent at Bucca under the control of US troops, there is little doubt he would have seen, heard of, and perhaps experienced at least some of the brutality that characterized US treatment of prisoners in Iraq. Only a few months before al-Baghdadi was imprisoned at Bucca prison, the torture photos from Abu Ghraib prison had been made public. It is unclear whether any prisoners who experienced that brutality at Abu Ghraib or elsewhere were present at Bucca with al-Baghdadi, but it is certain that reports of the torture were extensive throughout the US prison system in Iraq.

The time in prison was also an opportunity for strategic planning and recruiting for AQI’s expanding anti-occupation and anti-Shi’a resistance. Other former prisoners in Bucca, in 2004 and later, recall al-Baghdadi’s arrival and the role he and others played in education, organizing and planning for future military actions. There is little doubt that al-Baghdadi’s time in US custody was instrumental in his rise to the leadership of what would become one of the most powerful extremist militias in the Middle East.

Before and during al-Baghdadi’s incarceration in the US military prison, the anti-occupation resistance was rapidly expanding. As The Guardian described it, ‘When Baghdadi, aged 33, arrived at Bucca, the Sunni-led anti-US insurgency was gathering steam across central and western Iraq. An invasion that had been sold as a war of liberation had become a grinding occupation. Iraq’s Sunnis, disenfranchised by the overthrow of their patron, Saddam Hussein, were taking the fight to US forces – and starting to turn their guns towards the beneficiaries of Hussein’s overthrow, the country’s majority Shi’a population.’

Did the US troop surge in 2008 diminish sectarian fighting?

Although the Bush administration claimed that its troop ‘surge’ of 30,000 additional US military forces was the reason for the relative decline in sectarian fighting by 2008, the reality was far more complicated. It included the buying off of most of the leaders of Sunni tribal militias, the impact of a unilateral ceasefire declared in August 2007 by Shi’a militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, and the horrific reality that the sectarian battles had largely achieved their goal. That is, by 2008 most mixed villages and towns had been ethnically cleansed to become almost entirely Sunni or Shi’a. Baghdad, historically a cosmopolitan mash-up of every religion and ethnicity, had become a city of districts defined by sect. Whether Sunni, Shi’a, Christian, or other, neighbourhoods were largely separated by giant cement blast walls.

In 2008, the US turned its commitment to paying the Sunni Awakening militias over to the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government. Almost immediately, payments stopped, and the US-backed government under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki escalated its sectarian practices. More and more Sunni generals and other military leaders, as well as ordinary Sunni Iraqis, turned against the government even as US troops were slowly being withdrawn, and by 2009 and into 2010, a serious Sunni uprising was under way.

The Islamic State in Iraq, or ISI, had never joined the Sunni Awakening. It maintained its focus on fighting against the US occupation and the Iraqi government, although its military activities had diminished somewhat as the overall sectarian warfare had waned. But as the sectarian fighting escalated again in 2010, ISI re-emerged as a leading Sunni force, attacking the government, the official Iraqi military, and the expanding Shi’a militias allied to the government, as well as targeting Shi’a civilians. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was by that point (whether newly in power or not) the clear chief of ISI, and he began to strengthen the military capacity of the organization, including by several attacks on prisons aimed at freeing key military leaders of the group.

How did ISIS begin to expand beyond Iraq?

In 2011, ISI emerged for the first time across the border in Syria. The uprising there was just beginning to morph into a multifaceted civil war, and already the sectarian Sunni-Shi’a split was becoming a major component. That started with the proxy war between regional powers – Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’a Iran – but soon spilled over to include an internal divide between Syria’s majority Sunni population and the minority but privileged Alawites, an offshoot of Shi’a Islam. ISI took up arms against the Alawite/Shi’a regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. ISI was fighting alongside the wide range of secular and Sunni militias – including the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat an-Nusra, or Nusra Front – that were already confronting the regime. Soon, ISI turned to fight against those same anti-Assad forces, challenging those who rejected ISI’s power grabs, its violence, or its extremist definitions of Islam.

ISI changed its name again, this time to ISIS – for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. By some accounts the acronym actually referred to the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, Arabic for ‘greater Syria’. (See ‘How did the name ISIS evolve?’) Still led by al-Baghdadi and loyal to al-Qaeda, ISIS was rapidly gaining strength, not least from its recruiting of experienced fighters and acquisition of heavier arms in Iraq. It fought on both sides of the Iraq-Syria frontier, against governments and civilians in both countries, capturing crossing posts and essentially erasing the border altogether. In Anbar province and other Sunni-majority parts of northern and central Iraq, ISIS was able to establish a large military presence, supported by many Sunnis as a useful protector against the Shi’a-dominated government’s sectarian practices.

A major difference between ISIS and other militias, and particularly between ISIS and al-Qaeda, was that ISIS moved to seize territory. In doing so, it was not only asserting the theoretical goal of creating a future ‘caliphate’, it was actually doing so by occupying, holding, and governing an expanding land base across the Iraq-Syria border. In 2012 and into 2013, ISIS expanded its reach, establishing territorial control over large areas of northern Syria, including in and around the Syrian commercial centre of Aleppo. ISIS based its core governing functions in the city of Raqqa, which in mid-2014 was named its official capital.

Soon, however, relations deteriorated between ISIS and al-Qaeda, and between ISIS leader al-Baghdadi and al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. From 20l3 on, al-Baghdadi tried to bring the ‘official’ al-Qaeda Syrian franchise, the Nusra Front, under the control of ISIS. At one point ISIS announced that Nusra had ‘merged’ with ISIS, although Nusra denied the claim. Al-Qaeda leader al-Zawahiri, watching the rising power of ISIS and its ambitious leader, restated his official endorsement for the Nusra Front as al-Qaeda’s official Syrian counterpart. There were other disagreements as well, including the divergence between al-Qaeda’s religiously defined goal of establishing a global caliphate at some indeterminate point in the future and ISIS’s tactic of seizing land, imposing its version of sharia law, and declaring it part of a present-day ISIS-run caliphate. The disagreements and power struggles continued, and in February 2014 al-Zawahiri officially renounced ISIS, criticizing, among other things, its violence against other Muslims.

Five months later, ISIS declared itself a global caliphate. Al-Baghdadi was named caliph, and once again the organization’s name changed – this time to the ‘Islamic State’. Since that time, small groups of Islamist militants in Sinai, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere have declared their loyalty to al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State, although it remains doubtful those links are operational. Throughout the summer of 2014, as the Iraqi military largely collapsed, ISIS moved aggressively to seize and consolidate its hold on large chunks of both Syria and Iraq, including Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

In August 2014 Patrick Cockburn wrote in the London Review of Books:

‘The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War.’

As the militants continued to enlarge their territory and consolidate their control of an ever-expanding population across the two countries, the Obama administration renewed consideration of direct US military intervention against ISIS. By late summer 2014 at least 3,000 US troops were heading back into Iraq. And with the very real humanitarian crisis of Yazidi Syrians trapped on Mount Sinjar as a pretext, the US launched airstrikes against Syria.

America was officially at war with ISIS. As Peter Baker of the New York Times described it: ‘In sending warplanes back into the skies over Iraq, President Obama… found himself exactly where he did not want to be. Hoping to end the war in Iraq, Mr Obama became the fourth president in a row to order military action in that graveyard of American ambition.’

Is there any precedent for the barbaric violence perpetrated by ISIS?

Much of what ISIS does is clear from massive international media coverage: kidnapping for ransom, whipping and other physical punishments, large-scale killing of civilians, and seizure of women and girls for rape and forced ‘marriage’ to fighters have all been well documented. Reports of ISIS destruction of irreplaceable, centuries-old works of art have devastated historians and archaeologists around the world. Some of the most shocking reported actions are used against those ISIS deems non-believers, including crucifixion and stoning to death. Some of those actions hark back to punishments used in ancient times. As is true of the eras in which the holy texts of other influential religions were written, the years of the Prophet Muhammad’s life were also years of wars and constant battles for survival; that harsh wartime reality, including its punishments and its brutality, is reflected in the Qur’an as much as it is in the Torah, the Bible and other texts.

And yet some of these acts are also all too modern. Beheadings, for example, are currently used by governments, including the government of Saudi Arabia, as part of contemporary penal systems. Other actions, such as burning to death, also have contemporary forebears in the vigilante justice of mob actions, including the torture and burning to death of Christians in Pakistan or the ‘necklacing’ with burning tyres during the most difficult period of the South African liberation struggles. Perhaps no image is as powerful as these highly publicized killings – beheadings, particularly of Western journalists and aid workers, and the torture-death of Muath al-Kaseasbeh, a captured Jordanian bomber pilot, who was burned alive in a cage.

Those gruesome killings have come to symbolize the cruelty and violence at the core of ISIS, although it should be noted that these actions are hardly particular to the extremist organization. ISIS didn’t invent the modern version of burning someone alive for revenge: Israeli extremists kidnapped a young Palestinian boy and burned him to death in June 2014, following the unrelated killing of three Israeli teenagers. Not too long ago, hundreds of mainly African-American men were burned to death – often after other horrifying tortures – in lynchings across the American South. That’s aside from the even more common and more recent realities of burning people to death – civilians, children – with weapons of war designed to do just that, such as the napalm and white phosphorous used by the US in Vietnam and Iraq and by Israel in Gaza. There is also a long history of beheadings in world history; during the French Revolution the Jacobins are thought to have beheaded 17,000 people. Much more recently, in September 2014, the US-backed Free Syrian Army beheaded six ISIS captives, just days after ISIS beheaded two US journalists. And there is a longstanding legacy much closer to home, and much closer to ISIS: Saudi Arabia itself. In the first two weeks of 2015 alone, the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded 10 people for ‘crimes’ including apostasy, sorcery and witchcraft.

There are differences, of course. The Saudis arrested the journalist who leaked video of a recent beheading to the world; ISIS posts its carefully constructed videos on YouTube and other social media platforms to trumpet its crimes. The reason has much to do with ISIS’s assumption that showing that level of violence, up close and personal, will also somehow demonstrate strength and commitment – and crucially, that it will show ISIS as winning. For some, there is also the attraction of violence itself. There are reports that some ISIS combatants and wannabe fighters, in particular international supporters, do not hold strong Islamic beliefs at all, but are actually attracted to the organization by the violence itself. Understanding that frightening reality is crucial to understanding how an organization so identified with violence can still gain support.

What are the motives and root causes underlying the ISIS tactic of public execution?

Each time ISIS kills a Western journalist or a Jordanian bomber pilot, the US, Jordan, Japan, or others, escalate their own direct military engagement. It was only after ISIS beheaded American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff in summer 2014 that the Obama administration finally announced it would send troops back to Iraq. It then returned to bombing Iraq and launched the first attacks in Syria. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe responded to the killing of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto with efforts to undermine Japan’s longstanding pacifist constitution and promises to increase its engagement with the anti-ISIS war. Following the horrific killing of pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh, the king of Jordan announced plans to increase its direct bombing raids against Syria and Iraq within the US ‘coalition’.

As Stephen Kinzer wrote in the Boston Globe even before the killing of al-Kaseasbeh: ‘By cleverly using grotesque theatrics, the Islamic State seems to be achieving its goal of luring the US back into war. It knows that the presence of American soldiers in the Middle East will attract more radicals and misguided idealists to its cause. For many of these young men and women, fighting Kurds or Shiite militias may not seem especially glorious. To face the mighty US on Middle Eastern soil, and if possible to kill an American or die at American hands, is their dream. We are giving them a chance to realize it. Through its impressive mastery of social media, the Islamic State is already using our escalation as a recruiting tool.’

What does ISIS believe?

It is not possible to generalize with any accuracy what individual ISIS fighters, supporters, or allies – reluctant or otherwise – think or believe. Many of those who support or even join ISIS appear to be motivated as much by diverse combinations of political, personal, or economic reasons as they are by adherence to any specific theological framework. For some, the humiliation of foreign occupation, the indignity of repressive rulers and the sense of disenfranchisement from one’s own country play key motivating roles. We may never know exactly what each of those supporters believes. But the views of the leadership and the official positions of the organization are important for understanding who they are and why they act as they do – not to justify or apologize for its actions but precisely to figure out strategies that could actually work to stop its brutality, undermine its influence, and win its supporters away.

One way of defining what ISIS believes is to examine what distinguishes the group from its closest spiritual cousin and forebear, al-Qaeda, and the jihadi organizations still tied to al-Qaeda. Those distinctions include the nature of the ‘caliphate’ that al-Qaeda supports and ISIS has declared, the role and legitimacy of government, and – crucial to understand given the horrific brutality that characterizes ISIS – the role and purpose of violence.

When ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself the caliph, or leader, of his just-announced Islamic state, or caliphate, in June 2014, he was claiming a direct linkage to a much older religious/political position of power. The last caliphate was dissolved by the newly secular Turkish Republic in 1924 following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Like earlier Islamist organizations, including al-Qaeda, ISIS had already been advocating the idea of rebuilding the original caliphate, a term for the territory ruled by an Islamic leader, which came into use following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. But, unlike al-Qaeda, ISIS actually went ahead and acted to create a caliphate. The Islamic State declared by ISIS would be built in an undefined swath of the Arab world and perhaps beyond, beginning with the territory ISIS already controlled across Syria and Iraq. But its call for all Muslims and Islamist organizations to pledge fealty to al-Baghdadi as the new caliph was seen as a direct challenge, especially to al-Qaeda, which had already been feuding with ISIS over both political and religious differences.

A major point of divergence was precisely on the question of whether the caliphate could be declared now, today, as ISIS claimed, or whether it was a goal to be sought in the future, as al-Qaeda’s leaders had long asserted. Part of that question has to do with whether the legitimacy of a caliphate requires its collective approval by Muslim scholars, or even the umma, or Muslim community as a whole, or whether an individual Muslim leader can simply proclaim a caliphate as his own.

As the New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick described the two sides: ‘Al-Qaeda’s ideologues have been more vehement. All insist that the promised caliphate requires a broad consensus, on behalf of Muslim scholars if not all Muslims, and not merely one man’s proclamation after a military victory. “Will this caliphate be a sanctuary for all the oppressed and a refuge for every Muslim?” Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a senior jihadist scholar, recently asked in a statement on the internet. “Or will this creation take a sword against all the Muslims who oppose it” and “nullify all the groups that do jihad in the name of God?”’

Another point of disagreement between al-Qaeda and ISIS has to do with government. When the original caliphate, which held both religious and governing power, was dismantled in 1924, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was the first Islamist organization to emerge in that new period. Its goal was to contend for political power with the new secular forces rising in the Islamic world.

The Muslim Brotherhood became the model for generations of Islamist organizations that followed, engaging in political struggles – sometimes armed, often not – to win political power. But supporters of the most literal Wahhabi traditions refused to support any secular government; they recognized only the caliphate itself as holding legitimate power. All others, anyone who supported a secular or even religious government, would be considered a traitor, often sentenced to death. This shapes the antagonism of ISIS to organizations like today’s Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the democratic Islamist Ennahda Party in Tunisia, Hamas in Palestine, and others, and it forms much of the basis of the split between ISIS and al-Qaeda itself.

Al-Qaeda, of course, never attempted to govern on its own. Its goals had to do with overthrowing governments, particularly the Saudi monarchy, which it deemed insufficiently pious and too corrupt to be worthy of support. But it didn’t try to create a replacement government. When al-Qaeda took refuge in Afghanistan in the 1990s, it did nothing to challenge the Taliban government, nor to attempt any efforts to rule anywhere in the country.

But ISIS – having swept through and captured huge swaths of territory in both Iraq and Syria, including large cities with a population estimated at five to six million people – now has to figure out how to govern in the modern world. However medieval its ideology, this urgency explains the group’s efforts to recruit doctors, engineers, teachers and other professionals, and to bribe and threaten local experts into remaining on the job. ISIS officials need to find people able to keep the electricity on and the water clean and flowing, to keep hospitals open and medicine accessible. That means money, which means increasing efforts to sell oil, mostly though not entirely on the black market, from oil-producing areas under its control, and to raise other funds through taxes on businesses under its authority, along with extortion and kidnappings for ransom.

Al-Qaeda could concentrate on carrying out acts of violence aimed at destroying ungodly governments; ISIS needs to govern. And it may be that over time, the inability to provide ordinary people caught in ISIS-controlled territory with the ordinary requirements of life – jobs, electricity, schools, water, food, doctors – may lead to its collapse.

Finally there is a significant divide regarding the use of violence. It’s not quite accurate to claim, as many in the media did, that al-Qaeda broke with ISIS because it was ‘too violent’. The conflict is less over the amount or nature of the violence than it is about the purpose and the chosen victims. The essential al-Qaeda critique, in a sense, is not that ISIS was ‘too violent’ but that it used violence for the wrong reasons against too many Muslims.

For al-Qaeda, violence was primarily understood as necessary to overthrow heretical, or insufficiently devout governments – starting with Saudi Arabia because the monarchy there has power over the holiest shrines of Islam – and those governments that keep them in power, most notably the US. ISIS looked back to an earlier tradition. Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel describes ISIS as relying on ‘a kind of untamed Wahhabism’ that saw violence as having a much more privileged position.

As the New York Times describes it, ‘al-Qaeda grew out of a radical tradition that viewed Muslim states and societies as having fallen into sinful unbelief, and embraced violence as a tool to redeem them. But the Wahhabi tradition embraced the killing of those deemed unbelievers as essential to purifying the community of the faithful.’ That is the ISIS approach. Haykel described how ‘violence is part of their ideology. For al-Qaeda, violence is a means to an end; for ISIS, it is an end in itself.’

Another aspect of the ISIS belief system has to do with an apocalyptic vision of the end time, which they believe is coming very soon. The ISIS countdown to Armageddon is shaped by a Manichean notion (based on some early Islamic theology) of a battle between Muslims and crusaders. In its particular version, ISIS will lead the Muslims to victory in or near the small Syrian town of Dabiq, near the Turkish border, which ISIS occupied in the summer of 2014.

As Graeme Wood described in his widely read Atlantic article examining the group’s theology and beliefs: ‘ISIS has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam… The [ISIS] magazine quotes Zarqawi as saying, “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify… until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.”’

There is historical significance to Dabiq. In 1516 the town was the site of a major defeat of the Mamluk Sultan by the early Ottomans. But, for ISIS, what is most important is the belief that Islam – in this case ISIS itself – will defeat the armies of Rome, or the crusaders, in Dabiq. For the ISIS leadership, the importance of conquering this militarily insignificant town seems to have been based on the idea that ISIS can wait there for the arrival of an enemy army which it will then conquer.

The willingness of ISIS to wait for the crusader army to show up explains a great deal about the goal of its most gruesome atrocities. ISIS wants to provoke an attack by its enemies – the US, the West, the crusaders – on its own turf, just as the Qur’an predicts. The ISIS propaganda strategy is based on the understanding that the odds of Western armies coming across the world to attack ISIS in its own territory rise dramatically if ISIS can outrage Western public opinion. And the strategy has worked. The US and its allies decided to attack ISIS directly, rather than through proxies, only after public outrage at the horrors of ISIS treatment of prisoners and captured civilians.

In sending US planes to bomb ISIS in Syria and US troops and special forces to fight against ISIS in Iraq, in supporting US allies like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, and the UAE to attack ISIS throughout the region, the US and its allies are giving ISIS exactly what it wants.

What is Wahhabism? Why is it relevant to understanding ISIS?

For the leaders of ISIS, and despite the intensity of official Saudi opposition to it, the group’s roots lie directly in the Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam, which officially governs Saudi Arabia.

At its core and in its practice, ISIS is a thoroughly modern organization, but understanding it involves going back to the 18th century, when the Muslim caliphate within the Ottoman Empire was losing territory and power. As the renowned scholar of religion Karen Armstrong noted in the New Statesman, this occurred in the same period when Europe was just beginning to separate church and state – a new phenomenon tied to modernism and the Enlightenment. The Muslim leadership of the caliphate did not believe in such a divide, and instead a variety of reformist movements emerged, whose followers believed that ‘if Muslims were to regain lost power and prestige, they must return to the fundamentals of their faith, ensuring that God – rather than materialism or worldly ambition – dominated the political order. There was nothing militant about this “fundamentalism”; rather, it was a grassroots attempt to reorient society and did not involve jihad.’

One of those movements was led by a scholar from central Arabia named Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Many local leaders rejected his approach, but he found a patron in a powerful local tribal leader, Muhammad Ibn Saud. In the local wars rising among the largely nomadic desert tribes for goods and land, Saud used Wahhabism to justify its opposite: his military campaigns were clearly fought for political and economic power. As Armstrong describes it, ‘two forms of Wahhabism were emerging: where Ibn Saud was happy to enforce Wahhabi Islam with the sword to enhance his political position, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab insisted that education, study, and debate were the only legitimate means of spreading the one true faith.’

When Wahhab died, Saud and later his sons continued to claim that Wahhabism was the only legitimate version of Islam and that it could be ‘enforced with the sword’. Enforcing the Wahhabi version of Islam along with the practice of takfir, meaning identifying other Muslims as unbelievers and therefore deserving of death, became common ways of justifying mass killings that actually were committed for political or economic goals. Armstrong describes how, after Wahhab’s death, ‘Wahhabism became more violent, an instrument of state terror… Saud’s son and successor used takfir to justify the wholesale slaughter of resistant populations. In 1801, his army sacked the holy Shia city of Karbala in what is now Iraq, plundered the tomb of Imam Husain, and slaughtered thousands of Shias, including women and children; in 1803, in fear and panic, the holy city of Mecca surrendered to the Saudi leader.’

That was the origin of what would later – following World War I and British and French colonial machinations – become the state of Saudi Arabia. During the decades that followed, competing violent strands of Wahhabism vied for power and influence, including a rebel movement known as the Ikhwan, or brotherhood. With the quashing of the Ikhwan rebellion in 1930, the replacement of its rejection of modernity, and its extreme violence against civilians who disagreed with it, the official Saudi state presented a changed version of Wahhabism. Saudi Arabia abandoned the majority of the most violent practices, including the territorial expansion efforts that lay at the heart of early Wahhabism.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone agreed with that shift. There were struggles over the definitions, goals and traditions of Wahhabi Islam, and in many ways ISIS now shows its roots in some of those earlier practices. As Karen Armstrong describes the trajectory, ‘the Ikhwan spirit and its dream of territorial expansion did not die, but gained new ground in the 1970s, when the kingdom became central to Western foreign policy in the region. Washington welcomed the Saudis’ opposition to Nasserism (the pan-Arab socialist ideology of Egypt’s second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser) and to Soviet influence. After the Iranian Revolution, it [Washington] gave tacit support to the Saudis’ project of countering Shia radicalism by Wahhabizing the entire Muslim world… Like the Ikhwan, IS represents a rebellion against the official Wahhabism of modern Saudi Arabia. Its swords, covered faces and cut-throat executions all recall the original Brotherhood.’

Of course the immediate political trajectory of ISIS as an organization lies in the much more recent past, specifically the years of US occupation of Iraq and the rise of al-Qaeda. But its religious and ideological touchstones have much older roots, in Saudi Arabia, not Iraq.

How did the name ISIS evolve?

The organization known as ISIS, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (or for some, the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham), traces its origins to the earlier ISI, or Islamic State in Iraq, which was itself an outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), sometimes known as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Beginning in June 2014, ISIS changed its name again and began to refer to itself as the Islamic State, or IS. The organization has also been known as ISIL, or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. In much of the Arab world, it is known as Daesh, the Arabic acronym for al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil-Iraq wash-Sham (more or less the same as ISIS).

The original name, al-Qaeda in Iraq, reflected the origins of the group, claiming the Iraqi franchise of the al-Qaeda brand. The name change from al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, to Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI, took place during the US troop surge in 2006-07, when many Sunni militias were abandoning their opposition to the US occupation and instead joining the US-initiated Awakening movement, which paid them to fight with the US occupation forces instead of against them. The newly renamed ISI, which rejected the Awakening movement and continued its anti-occupation military attacks, was thus distinguishing itself from its former allies among other Sunni militias.

The next change, to ISIS or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, came when the organization, after the 2009-10 period of not-quite-defeat but certainly significant setbacks in Iraq, re-emerged in Syria as a rising player on the anti-Assad side of the Syrian civil war. This change also heralded the more ambitious self-definition of the group’s intentions – beyond the geographic expansion from Iraq to Syria, it was also now looking toward the elimination of the Syrian-Iraqi border as part of its goal. ISIS, whether one defines the final ‘S’ as Syria or al-Sham, refers to an older, pre-colonial definition of the territory: what was long known as ‘Greater Syria’.

Al-Sham, Arabic for Greater Syria, referred to a wide and diverse territory that had been under control of the Ottoman Empire for 400 or so years. It included more or less today’s Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and historic Palestine, including what is now Israel. So ‘ISIS’ generally refers both to the location of the group’s fighters and supporters – contemporary Iraq and Syria – and the aspirations of the organization. ISIS has been public about its goal of erasing colonial borders, starting with the border between Iraq and Syria, but it is easy to see its goals extending to reversing the colonially imposed divide between Syria and Lebanon and beyond. ISIS has said little about the issue of Palestine, but it’s difficult to imagine any discussion of colonial borders in the Middle East that did not quickly turn to Israel-Palestine.

The alternative contemporary version of the name, ISIL, or Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, may have emerged as a consequence of translation, rather than as the organization’s own choice. The group itself uses ‘al-Sham’ in its names, thus ISIS in translation. But al-Sham, historically, was the same thing as the Levant, a European term both colonialist and orientalist in its origins and usage. So the Obama administration’s conscious choice to use ‘ISIL’ rather than ‘ISIS’ reflects a deliberate intention to be insulting.

As Public Radio International’s ‘The World’ programme explains it, ‘The term Levant first appeared in medieval French. It literally means “the rising”, referring to the land where the sun rises. If you’re in France, in the western Mediterranean, that would make sense as a way to describe the eastern Mediterranean.’ Thus the colonialist legacy. PRI goes on, ‘Levant was also used in English from at least 1497. It’s kind of archaic, but still used by scholars in English, though more widely in French. The Germans have a similar term for the same region: Morgenland, or “the land of the morning”, It’s even more archaic in German and kind of implies an imaginary, romantic, never-never land.’ Thus the orientalist part.

Even the New York Times identified ‘Levant’ as ‘a once-common term that now has something of an antique whiff about it, like “the Orient”, Because of the term’s French colonial associations, many Arab nationalists and Islamist radicals disdain it, and it is unlikely that the militant group would choose “Levant” to render its name.’ But for the White House, apparently colonialist language does not seem to present a problem. At least through the spring of 2015, ISIL remained the Obama administration’s chosen term. There has been significant media attention paid to the word choice, but no clarity from the White House itself.

Among Arabic speakers, the most common choice is the acronym Daesh, or Da’ish, essentially the Arabic version of ISIS, but with quite negative overtones. The Guardian notes that ‘in Arabic, the word lends itself to being snarled with aggression. As Simon Collis, the British ambassador to Iraq, told The Guardian’s Ian Black: “Arabic speakers spit out the name Da’ish with different mixtures of contempt, ridicule and hostility. Da’ish is always negative.”’

Not surprisingly, some news outlets, governments, analysts and others have been reluctant to use the term ‘Islamic State’ to describe the militants seeking power across large parts of Iraq and Syria. They believe that using the term would give credibility to the violent extremist organization’s claim that it is a real state, a caliphate or Islamic state that somehow has authority over the world’s Muslims or at least is deserving of recognition as a state. For those who do use the term, the reasoning seems to be grounded primarily in pragmatic considerations: if this is the title the organization has given itself, we’ll use it for now, but using it doesn’t imply any endorsement.

But the term ‘Islamic State’, or IS, without the geographic specificity of the earlier ISI and ISIS versions, does have a propaganda purpose. The organization’s name change was not arbitrary; indeed it was announced in the context of the declaration of a caliphate – not as a religious vision for end times but in today’s real world, in real territory, in which it is governing real cities populated by real people. National Public Radio quoted a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff analyst who described the name change to Islamic State as ‘a very potent area of propaganda, because ISIS has attracted potentially thousands of foreign fighters, and none of these foreign fighters see themselves as terrorists. They see themselves as knights. They see themselves as mujahideen. They see themselves as freedom fighters…So they’re very interested in fighting for the Islamic State.’

Over time the brutality of ISIS rule and its inability to provide for the basic needs of the populations it controls will certainly undermine its support. But in the meantime, the claim of creating a whole new society, an Islamic State, however brutal it may be, has played a major role in encouraging the large-scale recruitment to ISIS-controlled territory not only of fighters but also of doctors, engineers, computer nerds, indeed whole families from around the world.

Did ISIS emerge because Obama pulled troops out of Iraq?

Many political opponents of the Obama administration, including (though not limited to) supporters of even more robust US military action in the Middle East, claim that the seemingly sudden emergence of ISIS was the direct result of the pullout of US troops from Iraq. This notion gained traction because of the timing of the two events. ISIS’s powerful military sweep across northern Syria and then into Iraq began just over a year after the last US troops left Iraq in December 2011. But the troop withdrawal was not the reason for the rise of ISIS in either Iraq or Syria.

ISIS’s re-emergence in Iraq after a period of relative quiescence in 2009-10 came in response to the escalating anti-Sunni sectarianism of the Shi’a-dominated government in Baghdad that was still armed, paid and supported by the US even while troop numbers were being reduced.

Before that, the origins and influence of ISIS in Iraq lie in the invasion and occupation of that country, which began in 2003 under George W Bush, not in the 2011 withdrawal of US troops. ISIS emerged in Iraq in 2004, as one of numerous Sunni militias fighting against the US, British and other coalition forces and later against the so-called Iraqi Interim Government.

As the anti-occupation war became increasingly sectarian, the Sunni AQI/ISIS continued to clash with the Shi’a-dominated, US-backed Iraqi government.

In 2006 and 2007, the Bush administration sent thousands of additional troops during the so-called surge in Iraq and organized the Sunni Awakening movement. ISIS had not joined the Awakening movement, but it was significantly weakened in the 2007-08 period, when it lost support of Sunni communities and tribes, many of which were taking money from the Awakening movement and pulling back from the military struggle. When the US turned over responsibility for paying the Sunni tribes to the Shi’a-dominated – and increasingly sectarian – Iraqi government, the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki stopped payments and escalated attacks against Sunni communities. Inevitably, the sectarian tensions increased and set the stage for the emergence of what amounted to a Sunni revolt against the government and an increase in Sunni support for ISIS.

Large-scale fighting started again by early 2009, and ISIS re-emerged as a major force, this time within the renewed Sunni uprising. Its target was primarily the Shi’a government, which had already signed an agreement with the Bush administration requiring the withdrawal of all US troops and all Pentagon-paid military contractors from Iraq by the end of 2011.

The new Obama administration actually reopened the withdrawal plan, trying to convince Iraq to allow up to 20,000 US troops to remain, but the negotiations foundered over the question of impunity. Prime Minister al-Maliki was reportedly in favour of keeping US troops in Iraq beyond the deadlines. But Iraq refused to grant Washington’s demand that US troops be assured of absolute immunity for any war crimes they might commit, and without that impunity, presumably knowing that US troops would certainly continue to commit war crimes, the US refused to keep any troops in Iraq.

The repression by the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government increased, the Sunni uprising escalated, and full-scale sectarian war resumed, with US participation through the end of 2011 and without the US starting in 2012. War continued, and ISIS played a major role in the sectarian battle. Under US pressure, in August 2014 al-Maliki was replaced by another politician from the same Shi’a party.

New prime minister Haider al-Abadi talked a more inclusive line, including announcing that his government would stop bombing Sunni communities, but he did little to change the sectarian practices of the military and police agencies, and thus the sectarian pressures continued. Sunni former generals, Sunni tribal leaders and others continued to resist the repression. Many of them continued their alliance with ISIS, seeing it as the strongest opposition to the US-backed government. Using a combination of conventional military tactics and the brutality it had become known for, including kidnappings, beheadings and sex slavery, ISIS fought against both Iraqi government forces and civilians: Shi’a, Christians, Yazidis, even Sunnis who did not accept its extremist interpretation of Islam. The Sunni revolt continued even as ISIS moved to consolidate its seizure of land and expansion into Syria, which would define the regional war for years to come.

Whatever the beliefs and intentions of ISIS leadership, its revival and renewed Sunni support – which made possible its rapid success within the Sunni revolt in Iraq – were directly linked to the continuing sectarian marginalization and repression against Sunnis by the US-backed and Shi’a-dominated government in Baghdad. So the origins and rise of ISIS stem from the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, not the belated withdrawal of US troops.

Where does ISIS get its money from?

Along with selling oil it produces from oilfields and refineries in territories it has seized, ISIS relies on several other sources of funding, including taxes levied on businesses within, and transporting of goods in and out of, cities, towns, and areas under its control. As ISIS consolidated its governance in northern Syria and western Iraq after declaring itself the Islamic State ‘caliphate’ in 2014, it began to operate as if it were an actual government. While some of this was purely for appearances, ISIS did begin to issue commercial, building, and drivers’ licences to carry out at least the basics of running public utilities, the operation of schools and medical facilities, and to collect taxes.

Taxes took the form of official-sounding taxes that any government might assess for commercial or other actions, as well as straight-up extortion. That reportedly included ISIS skimming money off the top of salary funds the Iraqi government is still paying to civil service workers in ISIS-occupied Mosul. Since ISIS took control of the central bank in Mosul, the salaries of government workers have been paid in cash picked up weekly by emissaries from the occupied city who meet directly with Iraqi government officials outside of Mosul.

ISIS has also gained hundreds of thousands, if not millions, as ransom from the families, businesses or governments of its kidnapping victims. While the US and Britain maintain staunch ‘no payment of ransom’ positions and have seen numerous US and British nationals killed by ISIS (as well as by other extremist organizations), various European, Asian, and other countries – both governments and companies – have brought their people home after quietly paying ransoms generally far lower than those demanded for American or British citizens.

Then there is the massive funding, by some reports second only to oil income, accruing to ISIS from sales of plundered ancient artifacts, putting the historical legacy of Syria and to some degree Iraq at even greater risk. The human rights section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science took satellite images in 2014 that, according to a scholar on the project, ‘show the destruction of ancient artifacts, architecture, and most importantly, archaeological context that is the record of humanity’s past. From the origins of civilization to the first international empires, Syria’s cultural heritage and these sites in particular are vitally important to our understanding of history.’ Some of those looted artifacts are being sold to collectors and dealers in the US. According to a February 2015 Wall Street Journal investigation, ‘in the US alone, government data show the value of declared antiques imported from Syria jumped 134 per cent in 2013 to $11 million. US officials estimate the value of undeclared pieces is many multiples higher.’

And ISIS is not the only force threatening Syria’s cultural treasure. The Journal article reports that ‘video published by a Syrian opposition media network on YouTube shows soldiers fighting for President Bashar al-Assad ’s regime at Palmyra with delicate grave reliefs loaded onto a truck. And senior Free Syrian Army fighters, the secular opposition that has received aid from the US, have long conceded to Western media that looting antiquities is an important source of funding.’

In early 2015, the United Nations Security Council passed a series of resolutions aimed at choking off sources of funding for ISIS as well as other extremist organizations including the al-Nusra Front. The Council condemned the purchase of oil from those organizations. But although it passed the resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which can authorize the use of force, it did little to bring real pressure on the global oil market to stop the trade, threatening only to send any violators to the UN Sanctions Committee for possible listing as a violator of UN sanctions. It called on all UN member states to freeze the assets of people who commit terrorist acts, and to ‘take appropriate steps to prevent the trade in Iraqi and Syrian cultural property and other items of… historical, cultural, rare scientific and religious importance illegally removed from Iraq since 6 August 1990 [when the first resolution aimed at protecting Iraqi cultural heritage was passed] and from Syria since 15 March 2011.’ The resolution also reaffirmed that payment of ransom to any organization on the UN’s al-Qaeda sanctions list, regardless of who pays, would be considered a violation of international legal obligations.

Then there is the politically embarrassing (for the US, at least) source of some of the most crucial funding for ISIS – important because it provides political and military as well as direct financial support. That source is the US-backed, US-armed petro-monarchies of the Arab Gulf: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar and beyond.

Writing in CounterPunch in February 2015, Patrick Cockburn reported that ISIS

is still receiving significant financial support from Arab sympathizers outside Iraq and Syria, enabling it to expand its war effort, says a senior Kurdish official. The US has been trying to stop such private donors in the Gulf oil states sending to Islamic State (ISIS) funds that help pay the salaries of fighters who may number well over 100,000. Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of the Kurdish President, Massoud Barzani, told The Independent on Sunday: ‘There is sympathy for Da’esh [ISIS] in many Arab countries and this has translated into money – and that is a disaster.’ … Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran member of the Iraqi Kurdish leadership who recently retired from the Iraqi parliament, said there was a misunderstanding as to why Gulf countries paid off IS. It is not only that donors are supporters of IS, but that the movement ‘gets money from the Arab countries because they are afraid of it,’ he says. ‘Gulf countries give money to Da’esh so that it promises not to carry out operations on their territory.’

Some of the most extensive reports are of direct funding of ISIS (as well as of the plethora of extreme Islamist organizations that preceded it) by Saudi Arabia, though the exact combination of government funds, state-linked institutional funds, donations from individual princes within the vast royal family, and contributions from wealthy individuals and businesses in the kingdom remains murky. This isn’t a new, or an ISIS-specific phenomenon. As Patrick Cockburn notes in his book The Jihadis Return:

In 2009, eight years after 9/11, a cable from the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, revealed by WikiLeaks, complained that donors in Saudi Arabia constituted the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. But despite this private admission, the US and Western Europeans continued to remain indifferent to Saudi preachers whose message, spread to millions by satellite TV, YouTube and Twitter, called for the killing of the Shi’a as heretics. These calls came as al-Qaeda bombs were slaughtering people in Shi’a neighborhoods in Iraq. A sub-headline in another State Department cable in the same year reads: ‘Saudi Arabia: Anti-Shi’ism As Foreign Policy?’ Now, five years later, Saudi-supported groups have a record of extreme sectarianism against non-Sunni Muslims.’

The US knew, but despite it all, the Saudi monarchy – known for its tight control over its own population – remained a key Washington ally.

There was of course a long history of Saudi funding of Islamic extremists in official and unacknowledged partnerships with the US. During the 1980s it was Saudi money that paid for the Afghan mujahideen warriors, trained and backed by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI intelligence services, who battled Soviet-backed forces at Washington’s behest at the height of Reagan’s Cold War. There are countless reports of Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks themselves, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens; the storied 28-page section of the official 9/11 report, which remains fully redacted and unavailable to the public, allegedly details some of that involvement. The focus on that potential scandal had waned in recent years. But it gained new prominence with the sudden announcement in February 2015 that al-Qaeda operative and so-called 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui, serving a life sentence in a US prison, had testified in a related trial about the powerful Saudi princes who had funded bin Laden’s and others’ terrorist actions. He named names, including Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi ambassador to the US; influential billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal; and many of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful clerics. All the princes (though probably not the imams) had long experience in and with the US, some in close relationships at the highest levels of US government.

Other regional leaders have been even more direct in holding the Gulf monarchies responsible for the rise in extremism. US-backed Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki, in March 2014, blamed Saudi Arabia and Qatar. As quoted by Patrick Cockburn in The Jihadis Return, Maliki told an interviewer that ‘these two countries are primarily responsible for the sectarian, terrorist and security crisis in Iraq.’ While part of his goal was to deflect his government’s own responsibility for its sectarian, anti-Sunni repression, Maliki went on to say that the two governments were also ‘buying weapons for the benefit of these terrorist organizations.’ According to Cockburn, ‘there was considerable truth in Maliki’s charges.’

Such allegations are consistent with longstanding and now public US government unease over funding of terrorists coming from the Gulf states allied to the US. When The Guardian and other outlets were releasing the huge trove of WikiLeaks cables in 2009-10, one set dealt directly with US concerns about Saudi and other Gulf states’ funding of Islamist extremists, in the years when ISIS was still functioning as al-Qaeda in Iraq and as the Islamic State of Iraq.

According to The Guardian:

Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton. ‘More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the deadly Mumbai attack of 2008] and other terrorist groups,’ says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state.

‘Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,’ she said. Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates… Saudi officials are often painted as reluctant partners. Clinton complained of the ‘ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist funds emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority’…

In common with its neighbours, Kuwait is described as a ‘source of funds and a key transit point’ for al-Qaeda and other militant groups. While the government has acted against attacks on its own soil, it is ‘less inclined to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks outside of Kuwait’.

Saudi funding, whether from individuals, government-backed institutions, or Saudi princes themselves, would certainly fit with the religious/political support for Sunni Islamist extremism that has characterized Saudi domestic and foreign policy for decades. That policy has included a powerful anti-Shi’a component that fits easily with lethal treatment by ISIS of Shi’a in the areas it controls. Storied Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk wrote in July 2014 that:

Some time before 9/11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: ‘The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally “God help the Shi’a”. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.’

The fatal moment predicted by Prince Bandar may now have come for many Shi’a, with Saudi Arabia playing an important role in bringing it about by supporting the anti-Shi’a jihad in Iraq and Syria…

Dearlove, who headed MI6 from 1999 to 2004, emphasized the significance of Prince Bandar’s words, saying that they constituted ‘a chilling comment that I remember very well indeed.’ He does not doubt that substantial and sustained funding from private donors in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to which the authorities may have turned a blind eye, has played a central role in the Isis surge into Sunni areas of Iraq. He said: ‘Such things simply do not happen spontaneously’…

Dearlove’s explosive revelation about the prediction of a day of reckoning for the Shi’a by Prince Bandar, and the former head of MI6’s view that Saudi Arabia is involved in the ISIS-led Sunni rebellion, has attracted surprisingly little attention.

Perhaps that refusal to pay attention is not so surprising, particularly in Washington. For much of that time, the US not only relied on Saudi Arabia as one of its most important Middle East strategic partners, but also sold tens of billions of dollars’ worth of the most sophisticated US weapons. In return, of course, the Saudis guaranteed the US access to and significant levels of influence on their enormous oil-production process.

How does ISIS treat women and what is the role of women within the organization?

Islamic fundamentalists, as is the case with most of their counterparts in other religions, do not believe women are equal to men. From ISIS to al-Qaeda, from the Taliban to the government of Saudi Arabia, women are deemed not only different from men but lesser. Although some parts of Islamic law provide (at least aspirationally) some level of social protections for women, including economic security, in the real world women have little access to basic human rights. Women are excluded from much of public life, with severe restrictions on whether and in what jobs they can work. Many basic aspects of women’s lives, including decisions regarding their children, access to healthcare and education, legal status, and passports, remain under the control of their husbands, fathers, sons, or other male relatives.

In areas under ISIS control, women live under an extreme version of these restrictions. Aside from the limitations on their daily lives, the reports of what ISIS does to women in areas it captures are truly horrifying. Women kidnapped, raped, murdered, sold as slaves to fighters: the list goes on. Women are often taken and held as sex slaves or other roles when the men in a captured village or town are killed on the spot. The women targeted for such crimes are often non-Sunnis – Shi’a or Yazidi or Christian perhaps – but in some cases they may also include Sunnis who do not accept the extremist definitions of religion demanded by ISIS. In November 2014 CBS News reported an assault on a Sunni tribe in Iraq, in Ras al-Maa, a village near Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, now largely controlled by ISIS. In that attack, a senior member of the local Sunni al-Bu Nimr tribe described how at least 50 people were lined up and shot, one by one, of whom four were children and six were women.

So the punishments unique to women – including rape and forced ‘marriage’ to ISIS fighters – are carried out even as women suffer the non-gender-specific attacks alongside men. Women, indeed whole families, become victims of kidnappings, are forced from their homes, and face the risks inherent in US and coalition air strikes and other attacks aimed at ISIS.

Unfortunately many of the atrocities committed specifically against women are more quantitatively than qualitatively different from misogynistic traditions still in practice in some areas where ISIS has established a base and elsewhere. Forced marriage, for example, including the marriage of young girls, is a widespread phenomenon in poor rural areas of several Arab, African, and Asian countries.

The period of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and its overthrow in the US invasion and occupation that began in October 2001, provides a useful model. Treatment of women under Taliban rule was abysmal: many schools shut down, girls forced to leave school, urban women forced out of many professions, violently enforced restrictions on women’s actions, autonomy, dress, and more. Many girls and women were forced into marriages against their will. The US justified much of its anti-Taliban military engagement in Afghanistan with the language of protecting Afghan women. But it turned out that many of the warlords who had fought and lost to the Taliban, and later came back to fight with the US against the Taliban, held medieval-era views of women’s role in society that were strikingly similar to those of the Taliban.

When the US imposed a modern, more or less gender-equality-based constitution and laws, life improved for a small sector of Afghan women – those in Kabul and the few other large cities. But for the majority of women in the country, things did not get better. Forced marriages were a longstanding custom in many regions of rural Afghanistan (where the vast majority of the population lived), and they did not disappear when the US and its chosen proxies overthrew the Taliban. In fact, anti-Taliban warlords known for committing atrocities at times ended up in powerful positions in post-Taliban Afghanistan, including in the US-backed government.

Aside from the direct attacks on women, ISIS restrictions on women in public life are severe, including limits on schooling, separation of the sexes, prohibitions on many areas of work. There is no question the actions of ISIS are brutal and misogynistic. But it is also true that with the announcement of the Islamic State as a ‘caliphate’, ISIS asserted the goal of building a fully Islamic society, requiring the involvement of whole families, including women and children.

That state-building project is one of the key distinctions between ISIS and other extremist Islamist organizations. Time magazine’s Vivienne Walt described how

in al-Qaeda’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, young armed men holed up on the battlefield far from their families. But in Syria ISIS aims to install a purist Islamic state – an entire new country – as its name denotes. And so ISIS fighters are looking to build lives that are far broader than fighting the war, ones in which they can come home after a day’s battle to a loving wife and children, and home-cooked meals. As such, recruiting women into ISIS is not simply about expanding the organization. It is the essential building block of a future society. ISIS members have said their women do not fight, but are there to help build the new society.

In fact there are reports of significant numbers of women fighting for ISIS, including in an entire separate battalion of women fighters. Writing in Foreign Affairs, UN gender and conflict analyst Nimmi Gowrinathan described women fighters in ISIS within the historical context of women fighters in other violent movements:

Living in deeply conservative social spaces, they faced constant threats to their ethnic, religious, or political identities – and it was typically those threats, rather than any grievances rooted in gender, that persuaded them to take up arms. ISIS’ particularly inhumane violence can obscure the fact that the conflict in Iraq is also rooted in identity: at its base, the fight is a sectarian struggle between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, with several smaller minorities caught in between. It makes sense, therefore, that the all-female al-Khansaa Brigade of ISIS relies heavily on identity politics for recruitment, targeting young women who feel oppressed as Sunni Muslims. Indeed, anonymous fatwas calling for single women to join the fight for an Islamic caliphate have been attractive enough to draw women to ISIS from beyond the region.

Certainly the majority of people living in the so-called caliphate are local Iraqis or Syrians, held against their will by a violent movement controlling their villages or towns. But among those responding to ISIS recruiting efforts, the creation of the ‘caliphate’ as a physical place has drawn not only fighters but whole families to the territory under ISIS domination.

The Washington Post reported on how ISIS recruits families to its territory.

‘The more they are successful at creating a whole new society, the more they are able to attract entire families,’ said Mia Bloom, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who has written extensively about women and terrorism. ‘It’s almost like the American dream, but the Islamic State’s version of it.’

In the Syrian city of Raqqa, the group’s main stronghold, the extremists have established a clinic for pregnant women run by a female gynecologist trained in Britain. Boys attend school, studying almost exclusively religion, until they are 14, when they are expected to start fighting, [British analyst Melanie] Smith said. Girls stay in school until they are 18; their instruction is about the Qur’an and sharia law, as well as learning how to dress, keep house, cook, clean and care for men, all according to a strict Islamic code.

Bloom said the Islamic State also appeals to women by providing electricity, food and a salary of up to $1,100 per month – a huge sum in Syria – for each fighter’s family. The largesse is funded with money looted from banks, oil smuggling, kidnappings for ransom, and the extortion of truckers and others who cross Islamic State territory…

The United Nations has documented extreme brutality toward women by Islamic State radicals, including reports of women, particularly from minority groups, being stoned to death or sold into prostitution or sex slavery for its fighters.

But the Islamic State uses family imagery in its aggressive and highly polished online recruiting on social media, including videos showing fighters pushing children on swings and passing out toys, and children playing on bouncy castles and bumper cars, riding ponies, and eating pink cotton candy.

Certainly ISIS will not be able to maintain the reality of those illusory descriptions. But understanding the various reasons why some women might choose to support ISIS – the search for identity, wanting a sectarian or religious life, a sense of political or economic dispossession – remains as important in challenging ISIS influence as is the need to grasp the depth of the organization’s attacks on women.

How did ISIS suddenly become so powerful? Why didn’t anyone see it coming?

In 2014 ISIS was not new. It had been around at least since 2004, and had claimed its current name in 2011. But few outside of the region were paying much attention when this relatively small, relatively unknown organization suddenly swept across much of northern Syria, ignoring the border with Iraq and moving to occupy a huge swath of territory of western and central Iraq including Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq.

The ISIS announcement that it was establishing a caliphate, with the now-occupied Syrian city of Raqqa as its capital, was shockingly sudden and unexpected. That announcement was one reason new recruits from outside of Iraq and Syria, even outside the Middle East, began joining ISIS in much larger numbers. But the US response was most concerned with developments in Iraq, where ISIS trampled the huge Washington-funded and Pentagon-trained military, whose soldiers and commanders mostly ran away, leaving their US weapons behind for ISIS to capture.

The immediate question was how ISIS was able to win what looked like such a lopsided battle. As Patrick Cockburn recounts in the preface to The Jihadis Return,

ISIS captured Iraq’s northern capital, Mosul, after three days of fighting. The Iraqi government had an army with 350,000 soldiers on which $41.6 billion had been spent in the three years since 2011, but this force melted away without significant resistance. Discarded uniforms and equipment were found strewn along the roads leading to Kurdistan and safety. The flight was led by commanding officers, some of whom changed into civilian clothes as they abandoned their men. Given that ISIS may have had as few as 1,300 fighters in its assault on Mosul, this was one of the great military debacles in history.

So how could ISIS win, even temporarily, against powerful militaries in Iraq and Syria? There are two answers. In Syria, it was the chaos of an exploding civil war, with the regime’s military stretched thin in some areas, and the anti-Assad opposition fighters – divided, poorly armed, and badly led – that allowed a better-armed, wealthier militia such as ISIS to move to a far more powerful position. There was simply too little opposition, and it was able to take over whole cities, such as its erstwhile capital, Raqqa, as well as sections of Aleppo and elsewhere, without serious opposition.

In Iraq, ISIS triumphed because it did not fight alone. It was able to take advantage of vital support from three components of Iraq’s Sunni community, support shaped by the increasingly repressive actions of the Shi’a-dominated sectarian government in Baghdad. They included Sunni tribal leaders, Sunni former military officers including Saddam Hussein-era Baathist generals, and ordinary Sunni communities who bore the brunt of the US-backed Baghdad government’s often brutal tactics.

Why did Sunnis support ISIS?

The reason for the Sunni support for ISIS had less to do with what ISIS stands for – many Iraqi (and Syrian) Sunnis are profoundly secular, and most remained very much opposed to the brutality of ISIS – and far more to do with the disenfranchisement of Sunni communities under the rule of Shi’a-controlled governments in Baghdad. For many, the ongoing repression at the hands of their own government made an alliance with ISIS an acceptable, even preferable option – despite, rather than because of, its extremism.

From the beginning of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the large Sunni minority had been at the forefront of opposition. Sunnis had been privileged under the Baathist rule of Saddam Hussein and held positions of power inside the government, especially in the military. All those positions were lost as the US occupation dismantled the civil service and destroyed the Iraqi army. Both before and after the creation of ISIS and its forebears, Sunni militias, some linked to tribal organizations and often led by former generals, played a huge role in fighting the US and the new US-created government and security forces being established in Baghdad.

The US-created Sunni Awakening, paying off Sunni militias to fight for the US and its allies rather than against them, worked for a while – the intensity of the civil war diminished. But the repression aimed at Sunni communities across Iraq never really ended during the Awakening movement’s heyday, and when the US and Maliki stopped paying off the tribes, the repression escalated and Sunni opposition rose again.

Maliki’s government had become a major part of the problem of sectarianism in the country. As a consequence, Sunnis were far more likely to join with ISIS, seeing them as an armed force that would defend Sunni interests, or at least challenge some of the worst abuses of the Shi’a-led government. Despite the US having created the Iraqi government, and armed and funded it for more than a decade, by 2013 or so the Obama administration recognized that Maliki’s sectarianism had become a major strategic threat to US interests.

Washington campaigned hard to get Maliki replaced in the 2014 elections, and that finally happened – but the result was disappointing. The new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, was from Maliki’s same Shi’a political party, and while his rhetoric tended to favour a more unitary and less sectarian approach, the ministries responsible for most of the repression (intelligence and defense) remained essentially unchanged.

And so did the Sunni resistance. The various components of Sunni support enabled ISIS to increase its strength and capacity. Some of the tribal leaders provided militia fighters to fight alongside, if not actually with, ISIS. In February 2015, National Public Radio noted that while the Sunni tribes are mainly in western Iraq,

you can also find them in neighbouring Jordan. Sheik Ahmed Dabbash, speaking from his house on a sleepy street in the capital Amman, says his tribe fought side by side with al-Qaeda against the Americans a decade ago… Now Dabbash’s group is in a de facto alliance with ISIS. His views are typical of a broad spectrum of Sunnis in Iraq – Islamists, tribesmen, one-time supporters of Saddam Hussein. They feel victimized by Iraq’s Shi’a-led government and many fight against the Shi’a-dominated army – either by joining ISIS or allying with them, even if they find the group extreme.

Those ‘one-time supporters of Saddam Hussein’ include military leaders, who may or may not have actually supported the former Baathist leader but who played key roles in the powerful Iraqi military. Those officers are widely believed to be providing both training and strategic planning for ISIS military campaigns. According to the New York Times, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s ‘leadership team includes many officers from Saddam Hussein’s long-disbanded army. They include former Iraqi officers like Fadel al-Hayali, the top deputy for Iraq, who once served Mr Hussein as a lieutenant colonel, and Adnan al-Sweidawi, a former lieutenant colonel who now heads the group’s military council. The pedigree of its leadership, outlined by an Iraqi who has seen documents seized by the Iraqi military, as well as by American intelligence officials, helps explain its battlefield successes: Its leaders augmented traditional military skill with terrorist techniques refined through years of fighting American troops, while also having deep local knowledge and contacts. ISIS is in effect a hybrid of terrorists and an army.’

Even recognizing the Times’ sloppy use of the term ‘terrorist’ – whose multiple definitions all start with attacking civilians or non-combatants, not an occupying army – it is clear that the unexpected military capacity of ISIS is bound up with the military training of former army officials of the Saddam Hussein era.

It is equally clear that changing the balance of power on the ground and reducing ISIS’s power means severing the still-strong alliance between ISIS and Sunni communities and institutions. That will be difficult, perhaps impossible, as long as the US and its coalition continue large-scale bombing of ISIS targets in the midst of heavily populated Sunni cities, towns and regions, and as long as the Shi’a-led government in Baghdad continues its sectarian attacks on the Sunni community. The goal of winning Sunnis away from ISIS is undermined every time a US or Jordanian or British bomber or fighter-jet attacks Raqqa, for instance, or ‘in ISIS-controlled Fallujah’. Both of those cities, in Syria and in Iraq, are heavily populated, and the likelihood of civilian casualties is almost inevitable. When US bombs are dropped and US policymakers cheer, Sunni Iraqis see it as another betrayal.

Because of the US military campaign, the claimed US goal of making new deals with Sunni tribes and winning over broader Sunni community support for the anti-ISIS struggle remains impossible to achieve. As NPR reported in February 2015, the ‘US view on how to defeat ISIS involves making a deal with Sunnis like [tribal leader] Dabbash, and even incorporating their men into a sort of Iraqi National Guard. “The Guard is a breakthrough idea, because it will ensure that Iraqis are protected by people with whom they are familiar and in whom they have trust. It’ll break down some of the sectarian divide,” said US Secretary of State John Kerry. But that trust is sorely lacking among Dabbash and other Sunni leaders who have yet to show signs that they are ready to make a truce with the government in Baghdad.’

As long as they can count on support – or even lack of opposition – from Iraq’s Sunni tribes, and as long as the multi-party civil war continues to rage across Syria, ISIS is likely to maintain its power at a level vastly disproportionate to its size.

Why are people from foreign countries joining ISIS and other extreme Islamist organizations in the Middle East?

There is a long history of foreign militants or wannabe militants travelling to the greater Middle East region to join Islamist campaigns. Perhaps the best known in recent years is the massive influx of foreign fighters who travelled to Afghanistan throughout the 1980s to join the indigenous mujahideen, or holy warriors, fighting against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. One of the most famous of these was Osama bin Laden. The mujahideen were armed by the CIA, paid by Saudi Arabia, trained by CIA allies in Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, and welcomed at the White House by President Ronald Reagan, who called them ‘freedom fighters’.

More recently, foreign fighters travelled to Iraq to join various militias – including extremist Islamist groups, some of them linked to al-Qaeda – to fight against the US occupation. But the numbers were never enough to have a determinative impact on the military balance of power.

From the first months of the Syrian civil war, foreign activists arrived to support the anti-Assad opposition. As the initial nonviolent political campaign morphed into devastating civil war, many more arrived as humanitarian aid workers, driving ambulances, helping distribute international assistance. As the Islamist forces among the anti-Assad opposition rose in power and began to take over the major military roles from the secular democratic opposition, more Muslims from around the world arrived to join them. In some of the Islamist organizations, foreign fighters soon outnumbered Syrians.

In early 2015, the New York Times chronicled the wide range of reasons for the surge of potential fighters flocking to Syria to join the most extremist organizations. ‘Young men in Bosnia and Kosovo are traveling to Syria for financial gain, including recruiting bonuses some groups offer, counterterrorism specialists say. Others from the Middle East and North Africa are attracted more by the ideology and the Islamic State’s self-declared status as a caliphate. Counterterrorism specialists have seen criminal gang members from as far as Sweden seeking adventure and violence in the fight.’

There is no question that the process of embracing extremist Islamism very often begins in response to long histories of dispossession, disenfranchisement, exclusion and denial of rights among immigrant, Muslim or particular Islamic sects, and other minority communities in countries around the world. In the US, federal and state government policies are in place that continue to marginalize Muslim, Arab and other immigrant communities. Members of those communities, particularly young people, are often targeted during wars in the Middle East. President Obama acknowledged that ‘engagement with communities can’t be a cover for surveillance. It can’t securitize our relationship with Muslim Americans, dealing with them solely through the prism of law enforcement.’ But he didn’t do or even propose anything to actually change the US and local state and municipal policies that do just this. Further, he made the statement at a conference designed to counter recruiting by ISIS and similar organizations, which was held a full seven months after he had ordered the bombing of Syria to begin.

In many European, American, and other Western Muslim communities, support for ISIS, al-Qaeda and other Islamist organizations exists despite, rather than because of, the violence of these groups. In 2013 and 2014, reports surfaced of European Muslims travelling to Syria to join ISIS with their entire families, babies and children included, to establish new lives in the so-called caliphate. At the end of 2014, the Washington Post profiled a British father, arriving in Syria to join ISIS with his family – his ‘first four children had been born in London, his native city, but his new baby, wrapped in a fuzzy brown onesie, was born in territory controlled by the Islamic state’.

For many supporters from Western countries, the embrace of ISIS or other extremist organizations is often rooted in longstanding grievances at home. Those include permanent unemployment, discrimination, poverty, political dispossession, anger at rising Islamophobia, and the sense of not belonging to their country despite being born and raised there. Laws in Europe that prohibit hate speech are widely seen as perpetuating double standards, since they prohibit antisemitism but allow racist and Islamophobic slurs under the guise of free expression. Paris imam Mehdi Bouzid spoke of Cherif Kouachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers, saying: ‘We had lost him. Their message – the message [of radical Islam] – is tempting to those like Cherif. It promises them a place, acceptance, respect. They do not have that here.’

For some young people growing up in the squalid immigrant slums that surround many European cities, desperation and the lack of opportunity set the stage for often-petty criminal activity and sequential jail terms in violent prisons, which sometimes leads to indoctrination into some of the most radical versions of political Islam. Shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, the international press started paying attention to studies indicating that, as Reuters described it, ‘prison radicalization is a problem in countries ranging from Britain and the US to Afghanistan. However, France stands out because over half its inmates are estimated to be Muslim, many from communities blighted by poverty and unemployment.’ The disproportionate number of French prisoners who are Muslims, at 50 per cent compared to their estimated share of between 5 and 10 per cent of the population, reflects the same harsh reality that civil-rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander, in her seminal book The New Jim Crow, highlighted regarding African-Americans in US prisons: that the criminal justice system perpetuates racial inequality.

In one of the distinctions between ISIS and other jihadi organizations, including al-Qaeda, the declaration of a ‘caliphate’ has led ISIS to focus on recruiting professionals, such as doctors and engineers, and their families to come to live in this new quasi-state. Images of family life in the ‘caliphate’ form part of slick, web-based recruiting campaigns. In Raqqa, the ISIS ‘capital’ in Syria, thousands of local residents have been forced out, their homes distributed to ISIS fighters, supporters and their families, who also receive money, electricity and healthcare. Reportedly, education for children – boys and girls – is available, shaped by the ISIS version of Islam and sharia law. At the same time, extreme brutality – toward local civilians, particularly women, non-Muslims, anyone who opposes ISIS rule, anyone who differs from the ISIS leadership’s fanatical interpretations of Islam – remains the norm.

Is the typical ISIS fighter a Muslim of Middle Eastern descent?

Not all foreign supporters are coming from Western countries. As an imprisoned Saudi human rights activist told the Washington Post: ‘So many Saudis are engaged with the Islamic State because of the lack of political freedoms in our country. They are frustrated because they cannot express themselves.’ Describing young prisoners being recruited to join the Islamic State, he said: ‘It’s like committing suicide for them to join the Islamic State, but they feel that their lives don’t matter because of the injustice in this country. That’s what happens when people are deprived of their rights.’

But throughout 2014, reports also began to surface regarding young people, mainly Europeans, who were either almost secular, non-practising Muslims or not Muslim at all, choosing to join ISIS or other violent organizations because of alienation or other reasons unrelated to religious extremism. As the author of Inside British Islam, Innes Bowen, told Business Insider magazine: ‘There was no single type of person who becomes a radical in the UK, and no single pathway to their ideology. There must be a range of motivations – a sense of adventure, a misplaced sense of duty or idealism – some of those recruited are well versed in ideology and the politics of their radical cause, others are surprisingly ignorant.’ Numerous press outlets reported the story of young recruits in Europe who purchased Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies on Amazon before leaving for the Middle East.

The assumption that most would-be terrorist recruits are likely to be practising Muslims, most likely from an Arab or other immigrant background, and somehow identifiable through racial and religious profiling, needs to remain suspect. A classified 2008 report from Britain’s MI5 that was leaked to The Guardian acknowledged that,