On June 10, 2014, the Islamic State arrived dramatically on the world stage with its surprise capture of the largest city in northern Iraq. The militant group, also known as ISIS, quickly spread throughout Iraq and Syria, filling a power vacuum left by years of fighting that had shattered many public institutions. They now occupy an arc of land as big as the United Kingdom.
Over the past two years, the militants have produced a torrent of startlingly sophisticated online propaganda that has helped persuade at least 20,000 foreign fighters to come join their fight from as far away as Australia. Their ultimate goal is to create an Islamic caliphate over much of the Mideast, governed by the militants’ extreme version of Islamic sharia law.
And now, with the attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian passenger plane, the Islamic State has declared war on the wider world, galvanizing new calls for an intensified global response.
The pope and the king of Jordan have gone so far as to say ISIS has triggered a “third world war on humanity.”
Inside the Islamic State itself, people interviewed by the Washington Post’s Kevin Sullivan and other reporters over the last year say the militants have created a brutal, two-tiered society, where daily life is starkly different for the occupiers and the occupied. Most lives are filled with fear and deprivation in the “caliphate.”
In often secret interviews, dozens of people who are now living under, or have recently fled, the Islamic State said the group had made their lives much worse, in ways that could be felt for decades to come — reversing gains in public education, ruining the medical infrastructure, establishing a justice system based on terror, and exposing a generation of children to gruesome and psychologically devastating violence.
“We went back to the Stone Age,” said Mohammad Ahmed, 43, a former Arab League worker from Deir al-Zour, a town near Raqqa, the militants’ self-proclaimed capital in northern Syria.
Those whose cities and towns are held by the Islamic State said they face not only the casual savagery of militants who behead their enemies and make sex slaves out of some minority women but also severe shortages of the basics of daily life.
And despite President Obama’s wariness of getting the United States entangled in another Mideast war, the challenges posed by the brutal Islamic State regime reach our shores daily.
Since the United States designated the Islamic State as a terrorist organization in 2014, the FBI has made an arrest almost every week in connection with the group, many of them of young people who were radicalized online. More than 60 people have been charged with material support and other charges.
The social-media savvy of the militant group is raising difficult questions for many U.S. firms like YouTube: how to preserve global platforms that offer forums for expression while preventing groups such as the Islamic State from exploiting those free-speech principles to advance their terrorist campaign.
Now that Russia and France have begun retaliatory air strikes in Syria to help in the battle against ISIS, U.S. efforts there have grown infinitely more complex. The Pentagon’s effort has so far focused on establishing a Syrian rebel force to counter the Islamic State, but it has shifted to aiding groups that are already fighting.
At the beginning of 2015, The Post set out to closely track the rise and evolution of the Islamic State and chronicle the reality of life under its rule, its implications for the Middle East, and efforts by the U.S. government and others to undermine it. The result is a startling body of work that illuminates just how intractable and dangerous ISIS is, and how difficult it will be to forever end their ability to terrorize the world.
The stories are collected together for the first time in this e-Book.