The next change, to ISIS or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, came when the organization, after the 2009-10 period of not-quite-defeat but certainly significant setbacks in Iraq, re-emerged in Syria as a rising player on the anti-Assad side of the Syrian civil war. This change also heralded the more ambitious self-definition of the group’s intentions – beyond the geographic expansion from Iraq to Syria, it was also now looking toward the elimination of the Syrian-Iraqi border as part of its goal. ISIS, whether one defines the final ‘S’ as Syria or al-Sham, refers to an older, pre-colonial definition of the territory: what was long known as ‘Greater Syria’.
Al-Sham, Arabic for Greater Syria, referred to a wide and diverse territory that had been under control of the Ottoman Empire for 400 or so years. It included more or less today’s Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and historic Palestine, including what is now Israel. So ‘ISIS’ generally refers both to the location of the group’s fighters and supporters – contemporary Iraq and Syria – and the aspirations of the organization. ISIS has been public about its goal of erasing colonial borders, starting with the border between Iraq and Syria, but it is easy to see its goals extending to reversing the colonially imposed divide between Syria and Lebanon and beyond. ISIS has said little about the issue of Palestine, but it’s difficult to imagine any discussion of colonial borders in the Middle East that did not quickly turn to Israel-Palestine.
The alternative contemporary version of the name, ISIL, or Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, may have emerged as a consequence of translation, rather than as the organization’s own choice. The group itself uses ‘al-Sham’ in its names, thus ISIS in translation. But al-Sham, historically, was the same thing as the Levant, a European term both colonialist and orientalist in its origins and usage. So the Obama administration’s conscious choice to use ‘ISIL’ rather than ‘ISIS’ reflects a deliberate intention to be insulting.
As Public Radio International’s ‘The World’ programme explains it, ‘The term Levant first appeared in medieval French. It literally means “the rising”, referring to the land where the sun rises. If you’re in France, in the western Mediterranean, that would make sense as a way to describe the eastern Mediterranean.’ Thus the colonialist legacy. PRI goes on, ‘Levant was also used in English from at least 1497. It’s kind of archaic, but still used by scholars in English, though more widely in French. The Germans have a similar term for the same region: Morgenland, or “the land of the morning”, It’s even more archaic in German and kind of implies an imaginary, romantic, never-never land.’ Thus the orientalist part.
Even the New York Times identified ‘Levant’ as ‘a once-common term that now has something of an antique whiff about it, like “the Orient”, Because of the term’s French colonial associations, many Arab nationalists and Islamist radicals disdain it, and it is unlikely that the militant group would choose “Levant” to render its name.’ But for the White House, apparently colonialist language does not seem to present a problem. At least through the spring of 2015, ISIL remained the Obama administration’s chosen term. There has been significant media attention paid to the word choice, but no clarity from the White House itself.
Among Arabic speakers, the most common choice is the acronym Daesh, or Da’ish, essentially the Arabic version of ISIS, but with quite negative overtones. The Guardian notes that ‘in Arabic, the word lends itself to being snarled with aggression. As Simon Collis, the British ambassador to Iraq, told The Guardian’s Ian Black: “Arabic speakers spit out the name Da’ish with different mixtures of contempt, ridicule and hostility. Da’ish is always negative.”’
Not surprisingly, some news outlets, governments, analysts and others have been reluctant to use the term ‘Islamic State’ to describe the militants seeking power across large parts of Iraq and Syria. They believe that using the term would give credibility to the violent extremist organization’s claim that it is a real state, a caliphate or Islamic state that somehow has authority over the world’s Muslims or at least is deserving of recognition as a state. For those who do use the term, the reasoning seems to be grounded primarily in pragmatic considerations: if this is the title the organization has given itself, we’ll use it for now, but using it doesn’t imply any endorsement.
But the term ‘Islamic State’, or IS, without the geographic specificity of the earlier ISI and ISIS versions, does have a propaganda purpose. The organization’s name change was not arbitrary; indeed it was announced in the context of the declaration of a caliphate – not as a religious vision for end times but in today’s real world, in real territory, in which it is governing real cities populated by real people. National Public Radio quoted a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff analyst who described the name change to Islamic State as ‘a very potent area of propaganda, because ISIS has attracted potentially thousands of foreign fighters, and none of these foreign fighters see themselves as terrorists. They see themselves as knights. They see themselves as mujahideen. They see themselves as freedom fighters…So they’re very interested in fighting for the Islamic State.’
Over time the brutality of ISIS rule and its inability to provide for the basic needs of the populations it controls will certainly undermine its support. But in the meantime, the claim of creating a whole new society, an Islamic State, however brutal it may be, has played a major role in encouraging the large-scale recruitment to ISIS-controlled territory not only of fighters but also of doctors, engineers, computer nerds, indeed whole families from around the world.
Did ISIS emerge because Obama pulled troops out of Iraq?
Many political opponents of the Obama administration, including (though not limited to) supporters of even more robust US military action in the Middle East, claim that the seemingly sudden emergence of ISIS was the direct result of the pullout of US troops from Iraq. This notion gained traction because of the timing of the two events. ISIS’s powerful military sweep across northern Syria and then into Iraq began just over a year after the last US troops left Iraq in December 2011. But the troop withdrawal was not the reason for the rise of ISIS in either Iraq or Syria.
ISIS’s re-emergence in Iraq after a period of relative quiescence in 2009-10 came in response to the escalating anti-Sunni sectarianism of the Shi’a-dominated government in Baghdad that was still armed, paid and supported by the US even while troop numbers were being reduced.
Before that, the origins and influence of ISIS in Iraq lie in the invasion and occupation of that country, which began in 2003 under George W Bush, not in the 2011 withdrawal of US troops. ISIS emerged in Iraq in 2004, as one of numerous Sunni militias fighting against the US, British and other coalition forces and later against the so-called Iraqi Interim Government.
As the anti-occupation war became increasingly sectarian, the Sunni AQI/ISIS continued to clash with the Shi’a-dominated, US-backed Iraqi government.
In 2006 and 2007, the Bush administration sent thousands of additional troops during the so-called surge in Iraq and organized the Sunni Awakening movement. ISIS had not joined the Awakening movement, but it was significantly weakened in the 2007-08 period, when it lost support of Sunni communities and tribes, many of which were taking money from the Awakening movement and pulling back from the military struggle. When the US turned over responsibility for paying the Sunni tribes to the Shi’a-dominated – and increasingly sectarian – Iraqi government, the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki stopped payments and escalated attacks against Sunni communities. Inevitably, the sectarian tensions increased and set the stage for the emergence of what amounted to a Sunni revolt against the government and an increase in Sunni support for ISIS.
Large-scale fighting started again by early 2009, and ISIS re-emerged as a major force, this time within the renewed Sunni uprising. Its target was primarily the Shi’a government, which had already signed an agreement with the
