against governments and civilians in both countries, capturing crossing posts and essentially erasing the border altogether. In Anbar province and other Sunni-majority parts of northern and central Iraq, ISIS was able to establish a large military presence, supported by many Sunnis as a useful protector against the Shi’a-dominated government’s sectarian practices.
A major difference between ISIS and other militias, and particularly between ISIS and al-Qaeda, was that ISIS moved to seize territory. In doing so, it was not only asserting the theoretical goal of creating a future ‘caliphate’, it was actually doing so by occupying, holding, and governing an expanding land base across the Iraq-Syria border. In 2012 and into 2013, ISIS expanded its reach, establishing territorial control over large areas of northern Syria, including in and around the Syrian commercial centre of Aleppo. ISIS based its core governing functions in the city of Raqqa, which in mid-2014 was named its official capital.
Soon, however, relations deteriorated between ISIS and al-Qaeda, and between ISIS leader al-Baghdadi and al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. From 20l3 on, al-Baghdadi tried to bring the ‘official’ al-Qaeda Syrian franchise, the Nusra Front, under the control of ISIS. At one point ISIS announced that Nusra had ‘merged’ with ISIS, although Nusra denied the claim. Al-Qaeda leader al-Zawahiri, watching the rising power of ISIS and its ambitious leader, restated his official endorsement for the Nusra Front as al-Qaeda’s official Syrian counterpart. There were other disagreements as well, including the divergence between al-Qaeda’s religiously defined goal of establishing a global caliphate at some indeterminate point in the future and ISIS’s tactic of seizing land, imposing its version of sharia law, and declaring it part of a present-day ISIS-run caliphate. The disagreements and power struggles continued, and in February 2014 al-Zawahiri officially renounced ISIS, criticizing, among other things, its violence against other Muslims.
Five months later, ISIS declared itself a global caliphate. Al-Baghdadi was named caliph, and once again the organization’s name changed – this time to the ‘Islamic State’. Since that time, small groups of Islamist militants in Sinai, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere have declared their loyalty to al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State, although it remains doubtful those links are operational. Throughout the summer of 2014, as the Iraqi military largely collapsed, ISIS moved aggressively to seize and consolidate its hold on large chunks of both Syria and Iraq, including Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.
In August 2014 Patrick Cockburn wrote in the London Review of Books:
‘The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War.’
As the militants continued to enlarge their territory and consolidate their control of an ever-expanding population across the two countries, the Obama administration renewed consideration of direct US military intervention against ISIS. By late summer 2014 at least 3,000 US troops were heading back into Iraq. And with the very real humanitarian crisis of Yazidi Syrians trapped on Mount Sinjar as a pretext, the US launched airstrikes against Syria.
America was officially at war with ISIS. As Peter Baker of the New York Times described it: ‘In sending warplanes back into the skies over Iraq, President Obama… found himself exactly where he did not want to be. Hoping to end the war in Iraq, Mr Obama became the fourth president in a row to order military action in that graveyard of American ambition.’
Is there any precedent for the barbaric violence perpetrated by ISIS?
Much of what ISIS does is clear from massive international media coverage: kidnapping for ransom, whipping and other physical punishments, large-scale killing of civilians, and seizure of women and girls for rape and forced ‘marriage’ to fighters have all been well documented. Reports of ISIS destruction of irreplaceable, centuries-old works of art have devastated historians and archaeologists around the world. Some of the most shocking reported actions are used against those ISIS deems non-believers, including crucifixion and stoning to death. Some of those actions hark back to punishments used in ancient times. As is true of the eras in which the holy texts of other influential religions were written, the years of the Prophet Muhammad’s life were also years of wars and constant battles for survival; that harsh wartime reality, including its punishments and its brutality, is reflected in the Qur’an as much as it is in the Torah, the Bible and other texts.
And yet some of these acts are also all too modern. Beheadings, for example, are currently used by governments, including the government of Saudi Arabia, as part of contemporary penal systems. Other actions, such as burning to death, also have contemporary forebears in the vigilante justice of mob actions, including the torture and burning to death of Christians in Pakistan or the ‘necklacing’ with burning tyres during the most difficult period of the South African liberation struggles. Perhaps no image is as powerful as these highly publicized killings – beheadings, particularly of Western journalists and aid workers, and the torture-death of Muath al-Kaseasbeh, a captured Jordanian bomber pilot, who was burned alive in a cage.
Those gruesome killings have come to symbolize the cruelty and violence at the core of ISIS, although it should be noted that these actions are hardly particular to the extremist organization. ISIS didn’t invent the modern version of burning someone alive for revenge: Israeli extremists kidnapped a young Palestinian boy and burned him to death in June 2014, following the unrelated killing of three Israeli teenagers. Not too long ago, hundreds of mainly African-American men were burned to death – often after other horrifying tortures – in lynchings across the American South. That’s aside from the even more common and more recent realities of burning people to death – civilians, children – with weapons of war designed to do just that, such as the napalm and white phosphorous used by the US in Vietnam and Iraq and by Israel in Gaza. There is also a long history of beheadings in world history; during the French Revolution the Jacobins are thought to have beheaded 17,000 people. Much more recently, in September 2014, the US-backed Free Syrian Army beheaded six ISIS captives, just days after ISIS beheaded two US journalists. And there is a longstanding legacy much closer to home, and much closer to ISIS: Saudi Arabia itself. In the first two weeks of 2015 alone, the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded 10 people for ‘crimes’ including apostasy, sorcery and witchcraft.
There are differences, of course. The Saudis arrested the journalist who leaked video of a recent beheading to the world; ISIS posts its carefully constructed videos on YouTube and other social media platforms to trumpet its crimes. The reason has much to do with ISIS’s assumption that showing that level of violence, up close and personal, will also somehow demonstrate strength and commitment – and crucially, that it will show ISIS as winning. For some, there is also the attraction of violence itself. There are reports that some ISIS combatants and wannabe fighters, in particular international supporters, do not hold strong Islamic beliefs at all, but are actually attracted to the organization by the violence itself. Understanding that frightening reality is crucial to understanding how an organization so identified with violence can still gain support.
What are the motives and root causes underlying the ISIS tactic of public execution?
Each time ISIS kills a Western journalist or a Jordanian bomber pilot, the US, Jordan, Japan, or others, escalate their own direct military engagement. It was only after ISIS beheaded American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff in summer 2014 that the Obama administration finally announced it would send troops back to Iraq. It then returned to bombing Iraq and launched the first attacks in Syria. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe responded to the killing of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto with efforts to undermine Japan’s longstanding pacifist constitution and promises to increase its engagement with the anti-ISIS war. Following the horrific killing of pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh, the king of Jordan announced plans to increase its
