Students: Bonus Material

ISIS: origins, evolution, and current status

The dramatic rise of ISIS, now the self-proclaimed “Islamic State,” came into sharp relief when ISIS militants swept across Iraq in June 2014 capturing major cities like Mosul and Tikrit, important infrastructure like hydroelectric dams and oil refineries, and overrunning strategic outposts on the Iraq–Syria border.

In order to understand the origins of ISIS, it is necessary to revisit the chaos and anarchy that followed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Militant groups proliferated in this environment and many jihadists coalesced around Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a seasoned Jordanian militant and veteran of the Afghanistan conflicts of the 1990s and early 2000s. From 2003, Zarqawi and his group, Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (“The Monotheism and Jihad Group”), waged a high-profile campaign in Iraq that included the beheading of U.S. citizens, the suicide-bombing attack on the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq in August 2003, another suicide car bomb attack later that month on the Shi’ite Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, and attacks on Shi’a shrines in Karbala and Baghdad in March 2004.

In October 2004, Zarqawi pledged his loyalty to Al-Qaeda and his group took on the name Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (AQI—“Al Qaeda in Iraq”). While Zarqawi was bestowed with the prestige and legitimacy of the Al-Qaeda moniker, Bin Laden secured a franchise in the most important theater of jihad. However, Zarqawi’s relationship with Al-Qaeda Central was fraught with tension from the outset. Most of the contention revolved around Zarqawi’s mass targeting of Shi’a populations in Iraq, a tactic that Al-Qaeda Central felt was tarnishing the image of the jihadi project. While the locus of Al-Qaeda Central’s goals was the more patient and gradualist targeting of “apostate” states and the “far enemy,” Zarqawi’s jihad had a societal locus, one that first necessitated the “purification” of Iraqi society through ruthless violence.

The sectarian emphasis of his activities was of particular personal importance to Zarqawi, whose writings and speeches were peppered with anti-Shi’a rhetorical flourishes. For instance, in his final public appearance before his death, Zarqawi declared, “The Muslims will have no victory or superiority over the aggressive infidels such as the Jews and the Christians until there is a total annihilation of those under them, such as the apostate agents headed by the rafida”—a pejorative appellation for Shi’a Muslims (Lister 2015). In January 2006, AQI announced its merger with five other groups under the umbrella of the Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen (MSM—“Mujahideen Shura Council”), in order to unite and better coordinate the jihadi insurgency in Iraq. With Zarqawi’s death in a U.S. airstrike in June 2006, the leadership of AQI fell to Abu Ayyub al-Masri.

While initially accepting AQI’s presence, Sunnis soon balked at AQI’s indiscriminate violence. In September 2006, Sunni tribes in Anbar Province formed an alliance to drive AQI out of the province, thus was born the Anbar “Awakening” or Sahwa. While the Sahwa—and its replication elsewhere in Iraq—and the U.S. troop “surge” contributed significantly to diminishing AQI’s operational capacity, the group re-established itself amidst the power vacuum left by the departure of U.S. troops from Iraq.

In October 2006, the MSM announced the establishment of a more structured successor group, al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq (ISI—“Islamic State of Iraq”). The following month, al-Masri pledged bay‘ah (allegiance) to ISI leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. The origin of ISI’s gradual and eventual divorce from Al-Qaeda can be located in Masri’s pledge to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, in the absence of any formal ISI pledge of allegiance to Al-Qaeda Central. In April 2010, ISI leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was killed along with AQI leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri in a joint U.S.–Iraqi raid near Tikrit.

The following month, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was announced as the new leader of the Islamic State of Iraq. The outbreak of civil conflict in Syria in 2011 was a gift for ISIS. As Syria fell into chaos, ISI expanded into Syria by jointly authorizing—along with Al-Qaeda Central—a Zarqawi associate, Abu Mohammad al-Golani, to establish a Syrian offshoot of Al-Qaeda. In January 2012, Golani’s organization formally adopted the name Jabhat al-Nusra l’Ahl as-Sham (“Support Front for the People of the Sham”). By the end of 2012, Jabhat al-Nusra had made a name for itself among the Syrian opposition groups as a disciplined and effective fighting force at the vanguard of anti-Assad forces.

In April 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced that he was merging Jabhat al-Nusra and ISI into a single group, ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah fīl-ʿIraq wash-Sham(“Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham” [ISIL or ISIS]), that would thereafter come under his command. However, Jabhat al-Nusra leader, Abu Mohammad al-Golani and Al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, both strenuously opposed the proposed merger. Many among Jabhat al-Nusra’sranks—particularly foreign fighters—defected to ISIS. Golani then pledged bay‘ah directly to Ayman al-Zawahri and announced that Jabhat al-Nusra would continue to operate as Al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria. At this juncture, al-Baghdadi had definitively split from Al-Qaeda. In February of 2014, Zawahiri publicly disavowed ISIS, formally ending their affiliation.

This schism within the jihadist movement reflected both strategic and ideological differences between ISIS and Al-Qaeda Central. On a strategic level, as previously mentioned, ISIS had by this juncture internalized the Zarqawist focus on localized societal “purification,” while Al-Qaeda Central was still focused on toppling regional “apostate” regimes and attacking their western supporters. Theological distinctions also soon emerged, particularly as regards ISIS’ emphasis on Islamic eschatology, which distinguishes it from other militant jihadist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra.

By mid-2014, ISIS had already seized most of Anbar province in Iraq and Raqqa province in Syria. In the Iraqi context, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had been pursuing policies that systematically excluded Sunnis from power, which undoubtedly galvanized Sunni populations against the central government. Moreover, as Iraqi national armed forces prepared to counter ISIS gains in Anbar, Maliki gave a controversial speech in which he depicted his planned counter-offensive as the continuation of an ancient war between “the followers of Hussein and the followers of Yazid,” a reference to the defining Shi’a battle of the seventh century. Ultimately, Iraqi forces failed in their attempts to evict the Sunni militants from Anbar.

In June 2014, an ISIS-led coalition of more than 40 armed groups, among them soldiers and officers from Saddam Hussein’s dismantled Iraqi army, launched a stunning offensive across northern Iraq, attacking Samarra and seizing Mosul and Tikrit within the space of a week. By the end of June, Iraq had lost control of its borders with Syria and Jordan as the Iraqi national army beat a hasty retreat. The threat to the institutions of the Iraqi state prompted multiple countries to intervene with a U.S.-led coalition providing air power in an attempt to stem the ISIS advance and delivering humanitarian assistance to ethnic and religious minorities in northern Iraq who came under threat of ethnic cleansing.

On June 30, 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in ISIS-controlled areas of Iraq and Syria. Baghdadi legitimizes his claim to the title caliph through a pedigree that allows him to claim descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Moreover, Baghdadi’s claim to the title of caliph is legitimized by his religious education. With a Ph.D. in Islamic studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad, Baghdadi is more credentialed in this regard than Al-Qaeda’s past and current leadership. The creation of the so-called Islamic State indicated al-Baghdadi’s intention to redefine the global jihad.

In capturing and governing territory, ISIS distinguishes itself from other jihadi groups in acting like a state—and in wanting to be seen as one. In territories that have come under its control, ISIS enforces a brutal Taliban-style model of governance insofar as it is similarly focused on morality, commerce, and war. Yet, it is important to note that a hodge-podge of non-ISIS Sunni forces, such as the Islamic Army, Ansar al-Islam (since merged into ISIS), the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order, and the General Military Council of the Iraqi Revolutionaries, played a significant role in the Northern Iraq offensive (Hassan 2014). Many of these groups do not necessarily see eye to eye—ideologically and/or theologically—and tensions between them have periodically erupted.

What distinguishes ISIS from other Sunni jihadist groups is its extreme brutality as well as a sophisticated and multifaceted recruitment and propaganda campaign, including a formidable social media presence, the production of recruitment videos, and the publication of a slickly produced magazine, Dabiq. Presenting itself as a vanguard movement, the Islamic State’s territorial conquests, declaration of a caliphate, and sectarian rhetoric have resonated widely. In effect, ISIS has rejected the conventional jihadi narrative of Muslim weakness and humiliation, replacing it with one of strength and triumph.

As a result, ISIS has been able to lure disaffected Sunni youth to its ranks through depictions of its battlefield exploits and by offering potential recruits a political project, a ready-made sense of identity, and an outletthrough which one might fulfill a presumed religious obligation. The ranks of ISIS, especially in Syria, have thus been swelled by European Muslims who have traveled to the region.

The rise of ISIS has precipitated a number of scholarly debates over its intentions vis-à-vis the United States and the degree to which its “Islamicness” is a useful lens through which to analyze the ISIS phenomenon. The first debate centers on the question of whether ISIS has been purposely trying to goad the United States into greater involvement in the region, or miscalculated by assuming that the beheading of American citizens would discourage a war-weary American public. The second debate revolves around whether or not Islam is a useful lens through which to understand the rise of ISIS with some commentators arguing that its identity-based extremism and millenarianism provide a more useful framework for understanding ISIS (Berger 2015; Wood 2015).

Despite its spectacular and swift advance across northern Iraq in June 2014, ISIS and its Sunni militant allies were advancing in their own “natural” habitat, whose outer boundaries it has already reached (Sayigh 2014). While its expansion has been checked to a large degree by U.S.-led airstrikes and Kurdish and Shi’a militias in Iraq—and it has lost control over some territories, infrastructure, and cities—it has made gains elsewhere seizing the city of Ramadi in Anbar and Palmyra in Syria in May 2015. Throughout 2015 ISIS experienced considerable growth outside the core areas of Iraq, establishing affiliate “provinces” (wilayat) or entering into alliances with groups in the Arabian Peninsula, the Sinai Peninsula, Libya, Afghanistan, and Nigeria, where the leadership of the jihadist movement Boko Haram announced an oath of allegiance to ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Ultimately, the appeal of ISIS to Sunnis across the Middle East and in other parts of the world may be limited to a great extent by the narrowness of its potential social base. There is of course, the possibility that ISIS will bring about its own downfall by alienating itself from its support base through its brutality, much in the way that AQI under Zarqawi did when it precipitated the Anbar awakening. In the meantime, however, it continues to succeed in leveraging a deep sense of political disaffectedness among Sunni communities in Iraq and the political turmoil of the Syrian civil war. It also continues to have some success in promoting its caliphate as a purified form of Islamic polity among certain segments of Muslim communities outside Iraq and Syria, and in finding pockets of support among disenfranchised youth in Europe and elsewhere.

References

Berger, J.M. 2015. “Enough about Islam: Why Religion Is Not the Most Useful Way to Understand ISIS.” Brookings Institution. February 18. www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-chaos/posts/2015/02/18-enough-about-islam-berger
Hassan, Hassan. 2015. “More Than ISIS, Iraq’s Sunni Insurgency.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Accessed May 19. http://carnegieendowment.org/sada/2014/06/17/more-than-isis-iraq-s-sunni-insurgency/hdvi
Ignatius, David. 2015. “How ISIS Spread in the Middle East,” The Atlantic Online, October 29. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/how-isis-started-syria-iraq/412042/
Lister, Charles R. 2015. The Islamic State: A Brief Introduction. Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press.
McCants, William. 2015. The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Sayigh, Yezid. 2014. “ISIS: Global Islamic Caliphate or Islamic Mini-State in Iraq?” Carnegie Middle East Center. Accessed November 30. http://carnegie-mec.org/publications/?fa=56203
Wood, Graeme. 2015. “What ISIS Really Wants?” The Atlantic, March.