The Islamic State group's blood-soaked path to global infamy
The Islamic State group's blood-soaked path to global infamy
Analysis: One year after it rebranded itself, it is clear that the group is unlike any other "terrorist" organisation the world has ever seen.
5 min read
Baghdadi has made only one public appearance, shortly after the fall of Mosul [Getty]
The Islamic State group has reportedly executed more than 3,000 people in Syria in the past year alone, horrifying the world with a carefully calculated and well-publicised string of atrocities.
Since it dropped the qualifying "in Iraq and Syria" from its title to become the "Islamic State" exactly a year ago today, the group has shot people, beheaded them, burned them alive and, most recently, drowned them en masse and executed them by rocket - fired into a car with the condemned locked inside.
"Those living under the terror of [IS] are in daily fear for their lives," said Ben Emmerson, UN special rapporteur on human rights in counter-terrorism.
"These shocking crimes are being committed on an industrial scale and amount to an affront to the conscience of the entire international community."
On the verge
Yet only four short years ago what was to become the world's richest and most powerful non-state armed group - capable of committing atrocities on an industrial scale - was merely a bit player on the Iraqi stage, believed to be on the verge of complete collapse or irrelevance.
It started life as Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, The Organisation for Monotheism and Jihad, in Jordan in 1999.
Under the leadership of its founder, the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it moved into Iraq after the 2003 invasion and became affiliated with al-Qaeda in 2004.
After Zarqawi's death in a US airstrike in 2006, at the head of a newly formed coalition of smaller Islamist groups and Sunni tribes, it rebranded itself as the Islamic State of Iraq.
The 2007 surge in US troops and the Sunni "awakening" movement, driven in part by revulsion against jihadi violence, put the group on the defensive. According to analyst Andrew Philips, by 2008 the group itself admitted it faced an "extraordinary crisis".
In 2010, the US announced the group had lost 34 of its top 42 leaders.
"I think they're struggling now, and I think it's going to be difficult for them to continue to recruit," senior US military commander General Ray Odierno said at the time. He noted the group had appointed new leaders, "but we're not even sure if there's actually people behind those names".
One of those names was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
New blood, new expertise
One third of the men Baghdadi appointed in his new leadership team are understood to have been former Baathist military and intelligence officers under Saddam Hussein, and nearly all of them had spent time with Baghdadi in US detention in Camp Bucca.
"The [US] prisons [in Iraq] became virtual terrorist universities," wrote military analyst Andrew Thompson and academic Jeremi Suri in The New York Times.
One of Baghdadi's new lieutenants was Samir Abd Mohammed al-Khlifawi, known as Haji Bakr, a former colonel in Saddam's air force intelligence. A former inmate of Camp Bucca, he rose to become the "strategic head" of the group and laid out detailed plans on how to take and control territory.
He met his death at the hands of Syrian rebels in January 2014.
The formidable network of surveillance, indoctrination, control and calculated violence Khlifawi's detailed plans laid out were based not on Islamic precedent, but on the formidable and brutal security apparatus that kept Saddam Hussein in power for decades.
Into Syria and onto the global stage
The Syrian civil war offered the group an unparalleled opportunity for expansion. The group initially maintained a low-key presence among the rebels, slowly building up its strength.
It survived a very public split with al-Qaeda in April 2013, after which it announced it had become "the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq". It went on to immediately recover the territory it lost to a coalition of rebel groups in December 2013 and January 2014.
The announcement on June 29, 2014, that the group wanted to be known simply as "The Islamic State" - the effective declaration of a Baghdadi's caliphate - came in the aftermath of the group's takeover of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
The city, which was meant to be defended by 30,000 Iraqi troops, was reportedly taken by only a few thousand IS fighters.
In styling itself as the Islamic State, and positioning its new head as caliph, the group is claiming putative authority over all Muslims around the world.
Though the overwhelming majority of Muslim authorities have rejected such a claim, it has resonated with armed insurgents in Libya, Yemen, the Egyptian Sinai and Afghanistan - many of whom have since declared allegiance to the IS in a sort of sub-contracted corporate franchising programme.
The brutal atrocities the group has perpetrated against Western hostages, civil and tribal opponents to its rule and non-Muslim minorities such as the Yazidis in northern Iraq have outraged the world.
The group has, however, doggedly persevered in the face of counter-offensives by Syrian Kurdish militias and the Iraqi government, backed by an international US-led campaign of airstrikes.
It has responded by seizing the desert town of Palmyra from Syrian regime forces, Ramadi from the Iraqi government and launching a brutal attack on the Kurdish town of Kobane in Syria - the Turkish border town its forces failed to take earlier this year in the face of massive bombardment by international aircraft.
In recent days, it has also organised or inspired attacks in Kuwait, France and Tunisia.
It is clear that the IS group poses a threat like none the international community has dealt with before.
"The Islamic State is not an insurgency like the United States fought from 2003 until its departure from Iraq," David Johnson, an analyst at Rand Corporation, wrote in a recent issue of the US Army War College's journal recently.
"Rather, it is an aspiring proto-state bent on taking and holding territory."
Since it dropped the qualifying "in Iraq and Syria" from its title to become the "Islamic State" exactly a year ago today, the group has shot people, beheaded them, burned them alive and, most recently, drowned them en masse and executed them by rocket - fired into a car with the condemned locked inside.
"Those living under the terror of [IS] are in daily fear for their lives," said Ben Emmerson, UN special rapporteur on human rights in counter-terrorism.
"These shocking crimes are being committed on an industrial scale and amount to an affront to the conscience of the entire international community."
On the verge
 |
These shocking crimes are being committed on an industrial scale. - Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur |
It started life as Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, The Organisation for Monotheism and Jihad, in Jordan in 1999.
Under the leadership of its founder, the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it moved into Iraq after the 2003 invasion and became affiliated with al-Qaeda in 2004.
After Zarqawi's death in a US airstrike in 2006, at the head of a newly formed coalition of smaller Islamist groups and Sunni tribes, it rebranded itself as the Islamic State of Iraq.
The 2007 surge in US troops and the Sunni "awakening" movement, driven in part by revulsion against jihadi violence, put the group on the defensive. According to analyst Andrew Philips, by 2008 the group itself admitted it faced an "extraordinary crisis".
In 2010, the US announced the group had lost 34 of its top 42 leaders.
"I think they're struggling now, and I think it's going to be difficult for them to continue to recruit," senior US military commander General Ray Odierno said at the time. He noted the group had appointed new leaders, "but we're not even sure if there's actually people behind those names".
One of those names was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
New blood, new expertise
One third of the men Baghdadi appointed in his new leadership team are understood to have been former Baathist military and intelligence officers under Saddam Hussein, and nearly all of them had spent time with Baghdadi in US detention in Camp Bucca.
"The [US] prisons [in Iraq] became virtual terrorist universities," wrote military analyst Andrew Thompson and academic Jeremi Suri in The New York Times.
One of Baghdadi's new lieutenants was Samir Abd Mohammed al-Khlifawi, known as Haji Bakr, a former colonel in Saddam's air force intelligence. A former inmate of Camp Bucca, he rose to become the "strategic head" of the group and laid out detailed plans on how to take and control territory.
He met his death at the hands of Syrian rebels in January 2014.
The formidable network of surveillance, indoctrination, control and calculated violence Khlifawi's detailed plans laid out were based not on Islamic precedent, but on the formidable and brutal security apparatus that kept Saddam Hussein in power for decades.
Into Syria and onto the global stage
The Syrian civil war offered the group an unparalleled opportunity for expansion. The group initially maintained a low-key presence among the rebels, slowly building up its strength.
It survived a very public split with al-Qaeda in April 2013, after which it announced it had become "the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq". It went on to immediately recover the territory it lost to a coalition of rebel groups in December 2013 and January 2014.
The announcement on June 29, 2014, that the group wanted to be known simply as "The Islamic State" - the effective declaration of a Baghdadi's caliphate - came in the aftermath of the group's takeover of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
The city, which was meant to be defended by 30,000 Iraqi troops, was reportedly taken by only a few thousand IS fighters.
|
The structure of the IS is based not on Islamic precedent, but on the brutal security apparatus that kept Saddam Hussein in power for decades. |
In styling itself as the Islamic State, and positioning its new head as caliph, the group is claiming putative authority over all Muslims around the world.
Though the overwhelming majority of Muslim authorities have rejected such a claim, it has resonated with armed insurgents in Libya, Yemen, the Egyptian Sinai and Afghanistan - many of whom have since declared allegiance to the IS in a sort of sub-contracted corporate franchising programme.
The brutal atrocities the group has perpetrated against Western hostages, civil and tribal opponents to its rule and non-Muslim minorities such as the Yazidis in northern Iraq have outraged the world.
The group has, however, doggedly persevered in the face of counter-offensives by Syrian Kurdish militias and the Iraqi government, backed by an international US-led campaign of airstrikes.
It has responded by seizing the desert town of Palmyra from Syrian regime forces, Ramadi from the Iraqi government and launching a brutal attack on the Kurdish town of Kobane in Syria - the Turkish border town its forces failed to take earlier this year in the face of massive bombardment by international aircraft.
In recent days, it has also organised or inspired attacks in Kuwait, France and Tunisia.
It is clear that the IS group poses a threat like none the international community has dealt with before.
"The Islamic State is not an insurgency like the United States fought from 2003 until its departure from Iraq," David Johnson, an analyst at Rand Corporation, wrote in a recent issue of the US Army War College's journal recently.
"Rather, it is an aspiring proto-state bent on taking and holding territory."
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