Islamic State
(ISIS)

The Islamic State's roots trace to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian jihadist who established Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) following the 2003 US-led invasion. Al-Zarqawi's extremism was so pronounced that Al-Qaeda's central leadership, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, privately urged him to moderate his campaign of mass sectarian slaughter — warnings he ignored. Al-Zarqawi was killed in a US airstrike in 2006, but the organisation he built survived and evolved.

Under subsequent leaders, AQI rebranded as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), exploiting the power vacuum created by the withdrawal of US forces in 2011 and the chaos of the Syrian civil war. Under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who assumed leadership in 2010, the group expanded into Syria in 2013 — renaming itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS) — and seized vast territories with terrifying speed.

On 29 June 2014, from the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul — a city of 1.8 million people seized in a matter of days — al-Baghdadi proclaimed himself Caliph Ibrahim and announced the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate. The declaration electrified jihadist movements globally and triggered an unprecedented wave of foreign fighter recruitment, drawing an estimated 40,000 individuals from over 100 countries.

At its peak in 2014–2015, ISIS controlled territory spanning from the outskirts of Baghdad to the suburbs of Aleppo — an area the size of the United Kingdom — and governed a population of approximately 8 million people under a totalitarian interpretation of Sharia. It generated revenues estimated at $1–2 billion annually through oil sales, taxation, extortion, looting of antiquities, ransom payments, and external donations.

A US-led coalition began airstrikes in September 2014, and a grinding ground campaign supported by Kurdish Peshmerga, Iraqi forces, and Syrian Democratic Forces slowly recaptured ISIS territory. The fall of Mosul in July 2017 and the final defeat of the territorial caliphate at Baghouz, Syria in March 2019 ended ISIS's experiment in state-building — but not the organisation itself.

ISIS espouses a form of Salafi-jihadism — a literalist, puritanical interpretation of Sunni Islam that rejects centuries of Islamic scholarly tradition in favour of a direct, stripped-back reading of the Quran and Hadith. It holds that the original Islamic community of the 7th century represents the perfect society that all Muslims must strive to recreate, by force if necessary.

Central to ISIS theology is the concept of takfir — the declaration that other Muslims are apostates and therefore legitimate targets for killing. This doctrine, derived from Sayyid Qutb's Muslim Brotherhood writings and radicalised further by ISIS ideologues, provided religious justification for mass slaughter of Shia Muslims, Sunnis who cooperated with non-ISIS governments, and virtually all non-Muslims.

ISIS's embrace of apocalyptic prophecy distinguished it even within the jihadist world. The organisation deliberately sought to provoke a final, world-ending battle at Dabiq, Syria — referenced in Hadith as the site of the end-times confrontation between believers and their enemies. This eschatological framework made negotiations or moderation theologically impossible and gave recruits a sense of participating in cosmic, world-historical events.

Unlike Al-Qaeda, which prioritised attacking the "far enemy" (the West) to destabilise Muslim governments, ISIS focused first on seizing and governing territory — building a functioning state as proof of concept for its divine mandate. The caliphate was not merely a political project but a theological obligation: once declared, all Muslims worldwide were required to pledge allegiance or be considered enemies.

ISIS committed atrocities on a scale that led the United Nations, United States, and numerous governments to formally designate its actions as genocide. Its crimes were methodically documented, often by ISIS itself through its sophisticated media apparatus.

Yazidi Genocide: In August 2014, ISIS fighters surrounded the Yazidi heartland of Sinjar in northern Iraq. Men and boys were executed en masse — approximately 5,000 killed — while women and girls were systematically enslaved, bought and sold in markets, and subjected to repeated sexual violence. An estimated 7,000 Yazidi women and children were enslaved. Thousands of Yazidis remain missing. The UN Security Council formally designated this a genocide in 2016.

Christian persecution: ISIS systematically expelled, enslaved, and executed Iraq's and Syria's ancient Christian communities — among the oldest in the world. The Christian population of Mosul, present for nearly 2,000 years, was entirely expelled in July 2014 after ISIS spray-painted properties with the Arabic letter "N" (for Nasrani, a term for Christians). Churches were destroyed or converted to ISIS administrative buildings.

Mass executions: ISIS filmed and distributed executions as recruitment and terror propaganda. The Camp Speicher massacre (June 2014) saw approximately 1,700 unarmed Iraqi Air Force cadets executed in a single operation. Prisoners were beheaded, burned alive, drowned in cages, and thrown from buildings — all filmed for global distribution.

Global terrorism: Beyond its territorial governance, ISIS inspired and directed attacks across Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia. The November 2015 Paris attacks (130 killed), the 2016 Brussels bombings (32 killed), the 2016 Nice truck attack (86 killed), the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing (22 killed), and dozens of other mass-casualty attacks were carried out by ISIS operatives or inspired by its ideology.

The collapse of the territorial caliphate dispersed thousands of trained fighters into pre-existing affiliate networks. Today ISIS operates through a global franchise model, with provincial commands (wilayat) conducting independent campaigns while remaining ideologically and in some cases operationally linked to the core organisation.

ISIS's geographic reach touches nearly every IFC regional desk. The communities most severely victimised by ISIS and its affiliates are among those the IFC was founded to document and advocate for.