Understanding the Islamic State

I — The Rise of the Islamic State

A group disowned by the Al Qaeda — for being too extreme — has set out to redraw the maps of the Middle East. Their unprecedented brutality and well engineered tactics routed a well funded, US trained army tens of times its size. Their organization and accounting are unparalleled, even for a bureaucratically efficient jihadi group. Their objective lies in hitting the reset button on Islam’s evolution since its conception and starting over. Their ideology is driven by the desire to establish an Islamic Caliphate as a central jihadist authority and more importantly to replace the legacy of the former Islamic Caliphates and the Ottoman Empire.

A group which would be known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and later the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) was founded by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq. It gained traction following the February 2006 al-Askari Mosque Bombing which triggered a wave of retaliatory violence claiming well over 1000 lives. AQI’s leadership was however dismantled by a US airstrike later that year which killed al-Zarqawi and dealt a severe blow to the group’s influence in Iraq — until it was revived by the bitter end of the Arab Spring in Syria and the consequent plethora of militant groups fighting the Assad regime, especially the al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat-al-Nusra. In April 2013, IS’s current leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a merger between al-Qaeda in Iraq and Jabhat-al-Nusra to a unified faction ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), a proposal which was rejected by al-Nusra’s chief Mohammed al-Jolani, possibly in compliance with al-Qaeda’s central command. In a joint letter to al-Baghdadi and al-Jolani, al-Qaeda’s number one Ayman al-Zawahiri made clear that Jabhat-al-Nusra belonged in Syria and the ISI in Iraq, a mandate which al-Baghdadi rejected. He set on to establish the ISIL, which caused a great deal of confusion amongst al-Nusra fighters in the battlefield until al-Zawahiri officially disowned the ISIL. One may infer that al-Zawahiri’s regard for borders drawn by the British and the French polarised the pan-Islamic sentiment within the ISI, further widening the rift between al-Qaeda and the ISIL. This is also reflected in the groups’ differing modus operandi in Syria: al-Nusra’s objective remains to overthrow Assad’s regime in Syria while ISIL focused on conquering more territory to establish political control.

On June 29 2014, ISIL declared its territory a new caliphate and adopted its new alias as the Islamic State (IS). As of August 2014, there have been reports of al-Qaeda fighters switching allegiance to the Islamic State. And with vocal supporters peppered worldwide and stimulated by the Israel-Palestine conflict, the IS holds the promise of becoming a rather hairy problem for the West when left unchecked.