Article by: Hisham Melhem
In June 2014, a small force of Islamic extremists routed the Iraqi army and seized control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. The militants then swept south, capturing Tikrit, until they occupied an area the size of the United Kingdom stretching across eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq. The militants, who had previously called themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, declared themselves the Islamic State and pledged allegiance to a mysterious figure named Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi. Clad in a black turban and flowing black robes, Baghdadi addressed the world for the first time that July and announced the reestablishment of the caliphate, the kingdom of God on earth.
The speed of the Islamic State’s advance stunned onlookers and appeared to herald the collapse of the state system in the Levant after generations of autocracy, economic mismanagement, and political oppression. The Western powers, including those that had drawn the very borders the Islamic State was so gleefully dismantling, seemed paralyzed by the group’s sheer violence. With its mass executions documented in high-resolution video, its enslavement of women and children belonging to the non-Muslim Yazidi community, and its filmed beheadings of hostages, the Islamic State seemed intent on setting a brutal new standard for terrorist violence.
read full article at foreign affairs
