Islamic State group in Anbar, Iraq in 2014 courtesy of Wikipedia
There's so much fascinating history perfectly distilled into this piece on ISIS by Graeme Wood at the
Atlantic that it's impossible to condense much of it into a single coherent sentence. But read closely, one tentative conclusion might be that this particular form of government, especially if it were to expand further, is simply not compatible with much of the modern world. A few graphs from
What ISIS really Wants to
wet your whistle:
Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.
[...]
In October, Dabiq, the magazine of the Islamic State, published “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” an article that took up the question of whether Yazidis (the members of an ancient Kurdish sect that borrows elements of Islam, and had come under attack from Islamic State forces in northern Iraq) are lapsed Muslims, and therefore marked for death, or merely pagans and therefore fair game for enslavement.
[...]
The United States and its allies have reacted to the Islamic State belatedly and in an apparent daze. The group’s ambitions and rough strategic blueprints were evident in its pronouncements and in social-media chatter as far back as 2011, when it was just one of many terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq and hadn’t yet committed mass atrocities.
A poor summary might be that those execution clips they're making are not something inadvertently caught in frame by a terrified photojournalist afforded a grim, glimpse of massacre in a foreign war zone. They are slickly produced Youtube features, ready to slot into social media, intended to produce a known effect: piss off the west and thus goad us into action, and recruit young people throughout the Middle East to meet us in battle. If so, it's a strategy that may be working. A new poll now finds a
small uptick in US support for a ground war and larger, growing frustration with events in the region.