The rapid advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) across northern Iraq in the first half of 2014 shocked the world. Appearing to arise out of nowhere, the group overwhelmed the Iraqi military, which the United States had trained and armed at a price tag of billions of dollars, and seemed poised to destroy the fragile political order that took a decade to reestablish. As it conquered city after city, including Fallujah and Mosul, ISIS circulated via social media stunning images and videos of massacres, crucifixions, decapitations, and other atrocities, cementing its ruthless and bloody image across the world. Culminating in its declaration of a caliphate in June 2014 and the adoption of a new name, Islamic State (IS), IS wanted the world to know that this was the inauguration of a new political order in the Middle East set on erasing century-old political truths. In its stead, it would resurrect a theocratic system imported from the seventh century and impose it by sheer force. It further communicated that it was not stopping there. As a self-declared state, IS wanted the entire world to believe it was ready to continue its offensive to reconquer territory it believed had fallen under the control of apostates and of territory it believed was usurped by nonbelievers. The new map it envisioned had large swaths of Europe and Asia under its control, and would further its objective of bringing about the end of times. Thanks to these battlefield successes, highly stylized propaganda videos, and impressive recruiting efforts saw its ranks swell even more, as people flocked from Europe, North America, and East Asia to the so-called caliphate. If people took its rhetoric at face value, it seemed unstoppable.
In many ways, this was truly the beginning of a new form of terrorism. The IS phenomenon was not concentrated solely in Iraq and Syria, as the group found devotees across North and West Africa, parts of the Arabian Peninsula, Afghanistan, and in places in East Asia. It immersed itself in preexisting conflicts in Libya and South Asia, it feuded with al-Qaeda—the leader of the global jihadist movement—and seemed like the next evolution of the polymorphous threat that al-Qaeda had represented over the previous fifteen years. Indeed, its successes, combined with the declaration of the caliphate, allowed it to co-opt groups formally aligned with al-Qaeda and other groups immersed in the broader jihadist movement. Many of these allegiances were opportunistic, capitalizing on the rising prominence of IS relative to al-Qaeda, the parent organization from which it split in 2014, while others represented concerted efforts by IS to expand the reach of its caliphate to other parts of the world. IS also exploited its network of foreign fighters, training thousands in urban guerrilla tactics and bomb-making skills before sending them back to their home countries to set up support networks and cells that could later execute future plots. In instances where they could not rely on a trained operative, the group took advantage of its vast global network of online supporters to plan further attacks and to increase the perception of its expansiveness and the danger it posed for the entire world. Not surprisingly, the number of so-called lone-wolf terrorists increased.
However, in the years since that fateful summer, things have not turned out how IS’s propaganda suggested it would. Within a year, it had lost a sizable portion of the territory it controlled and had suffered significant attrition among its leadership. This was a product of then president Obama’s decision to deploy American troops as advisors to Iraq and to use air strikes against IS to slowly dismantle, degrade, and ultimately destroy the organization. Combined with political reforms the United States forced onto the Iraqi government to win back the support of the Sunni population so critical to Islamic State’s success, IS began to collapse within Iraq and parts of Syria. Most tellingly, by the end of 2016, the Iraqi military IS had humiliated had been rebuilt and by July 2017 had retaken Mosul after having won back Fallujah earlier in 2016. This is not to say that IS is no longer a threat to the world or that the organization has been defeated. Rather, that much like other terrorist organizations that transformed into an insurgency, they came upon the stumbling block of needing to govern and holding territory to maintain their support base and to maintain their legitimacy.
As the group fades, questions remain as to why it succeeded in the first place. The reality is that the group’s tactics and strategy are neither new nor unique in terms of scale and devastation. As this book will explain in further chapters, in its push forward, IS relied on the same approaches used by other protracted insurgencies and meted out violence similar to numerous contemporary and historical terror organizations. Even their most brazen action, the creation of a pseudostate, has a strong historical precedent. The formation and expansion of a shadow government in areas where it maintained a degree of support before exporting it and expanding it was a practice pioneered by violent nonstate actors in East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, adapting Mao’s guide for insurgent warfare to their local circumstances. Similarly, the use of ceremonial violence to generate attention for the group and to both intimidate locals and fracture the ties between the individual and the state was used by the FLN in Algeria and the Vietcong at various times. Attacking public infrastructure to enervate the state’s ability to assert its ability to govern was part of the strategy used by the likes of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru and the Taliban against the American-backed government in Kabul after 2005 in order to erode the legitimacy of the national government. Meanwhile, the scale and ferocity of its violence is easily matched, if not surpassed in many ways, by Boko Haram in Nigeria.
Its ideology too is something it adapted from other extremist organizations, most notably al-Qaeda and the multitude of groups that form the global jihadist umbrella. If anything, the main difference is their willingness to assert the apocalyptical essence of Islam to justify the formation and expansion of the caliphate. As will be explained in subsequent chapters, its relationship with al-Qaeda is critical for understanding both its approach and its ideology. Representing the newest iteration of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), IS relies on the same assemblage of ideologues and theologians to legitimize its violence, its vision of Islam, and its right to govern as a caliphate that was first deployed by AQ.
This is to say that in purely practical terms, IS is a hodgepodge of the best approaches from the history of terrorism. To an extent, on the face of things, this seems to belie the idea that it marks a new inflection in terrorist violence the same way the regicides of the nineteenth century paved the way for the liberal and communist revolutions of the following century. This would be selling the group short if the analysis ended here. Despite its repackaging of terrorism’s greatest hits, IS has galvanized an entire generation of would-be jihadists across the world and has changed the rhetoric about the threat posed by terrorist organizations. If before the fear surrounding groups like IS or AQ operating in ungoverned spaces was that they could use these environments to safely plot attacks against the West, it has now metastasized into the implications of a terrorist group actually governing and having the industrial capacity of a nation-state to support its revolutionary aims. Moreover, by Americanizing its violence through the exploitation of modern telecommunication platforms to broadcast its message across the world, all neatly packaged in dramatic videos shared on YouTube and sleek online magazines, it has provided a new model for terrorist groups to imitate. In fact, at the same time that IS has lost territory the size of the United Kingdom and tens of thousands of fighters, it has retained an aura of invincibility due to its widely disseminated propaganda, which keeps implying the continued expansion of its caliphate, giving the group more credibility than is deserved.
If then what made Islamic State successful was the use of insurgency strategies with only the added benefit of being able to disseminate its propaganda far and wide, the question remains why it succeeded where others did not. Therefore, it is worth exploring not only its origins but also the implications for terror movements moving forward into the coming decades. This will become increasingly important as well when other groups operating in environments similar to IS begin dissecting the lessons of its rise and fall. Apart from providing a path forward for others to emulate, it will provide the blueprints for creating and consolidating a state. Certainly, when these actors do arise, they will need to be studied within the context of their times and politics, but at the very least, as this section of this book will try to demonstrate, there are certain generalizable trends about IS that will be present in the future. In the case of IS, while its declaration of the caliphate made it appear like a truly potent revolutionary power, the moment it sought to establish the framework of a state, it weakened its overall position, as it had to govern in a manner acceptable to the people it intended to rule while attempting to consolidate the territory captured to maintain its legitimacy. These problems, evident from the outset, were masked by the ineffective and corrupt central government in Iraq, as well as the continued civil war buffeting Syria. This is the problem that affects all terror groups eventually unless they reform their approach.
The possibility of another movement like Islamic State expanding rapidly and violently is not a reach. In the same temporal frame that IS devastated Iraq, terrorism has continued and evolved in key parts of the greater Islamic world. At the time of this writing, Boko Haram and the Taliban have yet to slow down the tempo of their insurgencies in Nigeria and Afghanistan, respectively, while Libya and Yemen continue experiencing bloody civil wars, joining Syria as contested states. In each of these cases, similar political realities animate the bloodshed that inspired IS initially. Additionally, the group that initiated the current wave of terrorism, al-Qaeda, is still dangerous, as it has taken advantage of the mistakes committed by Islamic State to rebuild its organization and adapt its strategy to capitalize on the emerging political realities once IS is no longer a threat.