The Whole ISIS Crisis

ISIS Territory

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; Arabic, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham, Daesh, or Islamic State (IS), is a Salafi jihadist extremist militant group and self-proclaimed Islamic state and caliphate, which is led by and mainly composed of Sunni Arabs from Iraq and Syria.

As of March 2015, it has control over territory occupied by ten million people in Iraq and Syria, as well as limited territorial control in Libya and Nigeria. The group also operates or has affiliates in other parts of the world, including South Asia.


The group is known in Arabic as ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah wa-sh-Shām, leading to the acronym Da’ish or Daesh, the Arabic equivalent of “ISIS”. On 29 June 2014, the group proclaimed itself to be a worldwide caliphate, with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi being named its caliph, and renamed itself “Islamic State”. As a caliphate, it claims religious, political and military authority over all Muslims worldwide, and that “the legality of all emirates, groups, states, and organizations, becomes null by the expansion of the khilāfah’s [caliphate’s] authority and arrival of its troops to their areas”.

The United Nations has held ISIS responsible for human rights abuses and war crimes, and Amnesty International has reported ethnic cleansing by the group on a “historic scale”. The group has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria and other governments. Over 60 countries are directly or indirectly waging war against ISIS.

The group originated as Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad in 1999, which pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2004. The group participated in the Iraqi insurgency, which had followed the March 2003 invasion of Iraq by Western forces. In January 2006, it joined other Sunni insurgent groups to form the Mujahideen Shura Council, which proclaimed the formation of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in October 2006. After the Syrian Civil War began in March 2011, the ISI, under the leadership of al-Baghdadi, sent delegates into Syria in August 2011. These fighters named themselves Jabhat an-Nuṣrah li-Ahli ash-Shām—al-Nusra Front—and established a large presence in Sunni-majority areas of Syria, within the governorates of Ar-Raqqah, Idlib, Deir ez-Zor, and Aleppo. In April 2013, al-Baghdadi announced the merger of the ISI with al-Nusra Front and that the name of the reunited group was now the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). However, Abu Mohammad al-Julani and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leaders of al-Nusra and al-Qaeda respectively, rejected the merger. After an eight-month power struggle, al-Qaeda cut all ties with ISIS on 3 February 2014, citing its failure to consult and “notorious intransigence”.

In Syria, the group has conducted ground attacks on both government forces and rebel factions in the Syrian Civil War. The group gained prominence after it drove Iraqi government forces out of key cities in western Iraq in an offensive initiated in early 2014. Iraq’s territorial loss almost caused a collapse of the Iraqi government and prompted a renewal of US military action in Iraq.

ISIS is very adept at social media, posting Internet videos of beheadings of soldiers, civilians, journalists and aid workers, and is notorious for its destruction of cultural heritage sites. Muslim leaders around the world have condemned ISIS’s ideology and actions, arguing that the group has strayed from the path of true Islam and that its actions do not reflect the religion’s true teachings or virtues. The group’s adoption of the name “Islamic State” and idea of a caliphate have been widely criticized, with the United Nations, NATO, various governments, and mainstream Muslim groups rejecting both.

Since at least 2004, a significant goal of the group has been the foundation of a Sunni Islamic state. Specifically, ISIS has sought to establish itself as a caliphate, an Islamic state led by a group of religious authorities under a supreme leader—the caliph—who is believed to be the successor to Muhammad. In June 2014, ISIL published a document in which it claimed to have traced the lineage of its leader al-Baghdadi back to Muhammad, and upon proclaiming a new caliphate on 29 June, the group appointed al-Baghdadi as its caliph. As caliph, he demands the allegiance of all devout Muslims worldwide, according to Islamic jurisprudence.