Rise of ISIS (2014): The Islamic State Caliphate in Iraq, Syria

The rise of ISIS was the sudden expansion in 2014 of a jihadist group that captured large parts of Iraq and Syria and proclaimed a worldwide “caliphate”. After seizing Mosul, Iraq’s second city, in June 2014, the Islamic State ruled millions of people, carried out mass killings, including genocide against the Yazidi minority, and inspired or directed attacks around the world. A long war by local forces and an international coalition destroyed its territory by March 2019, though the group survives as an insurgency.

Origins in al-Qaeda in Iraq

ISIS traces its roots to the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. After the US-led Iraq War toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, Zarqawi’s network waged a brutal campaign of suicide bombings and beheadings, targeting American troops, the new Iraqi government and above all Shia Muslims, whom he hoped to provoke into a sectarian civil war. In October 2004 he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and his group became known as al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Zarqawi was killed by a US airstrike on 7 June 2006. In October that year his successors declared the Islamic State of Iraq. It soon suffered heavy losses as Sunni tribes turned against it in the movement known as the Awakening and the United States reinforced its troops in the “surge” of 2007. In April 2010 its two top leaders were killed, and in May 2010 a little-known cleric, Ibrahim Awad al-Badri, known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, became its leader.

Syria and the break with al-Qaeda

Two developments revived the group. In Iraq, many Sunni Arabs felt marginalised by the Shia-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, especially after the last US troops left at the end of 2011 and protest camps were forcibly cleared in 2013. Baghdadi’s fighters exploited this anger, and a campaign of prison breaks freed hundreds of experienced militants.

In neighbouring Syria, the civil war that grew out of the 2011 uprising created a vast ungoverned space. Baghdadi sent operatives who founded the Nusra Front there. In April 2013 he announced that his group and Nusra would merge as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, abbreviated ISIS (also ISIL, or Daesh in Arabic). Nusra refused, and in February 2014 al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri formally disowned ISIS. By then ISIS had taken control of the Syrian city of Raqqa, which became its capital, and in January 2014 it seized Fallujah in Iraq.

The fall of Mosul and the caliphate

On 6 June 2014 a few thousand ISIS fighters attacked Mosul, a city of well over a million people. Within four days, despite having far fewer men, they captured it as Iraqi army and police units collapsed, abandoning weapons and vehicles, many supplied by the United States. ISIS swept south, taking Tikrit and approaching Baghdad. Near Tikrit, its fighters massacred hundreds of Shia air force cadets from Camp Speicher, with estimates of the dead ranging from about 1,100 to 1,700.

On 29 June 2014 ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani declared the restoration of the caliphate, with Baghdadi as caliph, and the group renamed itself simply the Islamic State. On 4 July Baghdadi made his only known public appearance as leader, preaching at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul. In response to the advance, Iraq’s leading Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called on Iraqis to take up arms, and tens of thousands joined militias later grouped as the Popular Mobilisation Forces.

The Yazidi genocide and other atrocities

On 3 August 2014 ISIS attacked the Sinjar region, home to most of the world’s Yazidis, a religious minority it regarded as devil-worshippers. Thousands of men and older boys were killed, and an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 women and children were abducted. Many women and girls were sold into sexual slavery, and boys were forced to become fighters. Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled to Mount Sinjar, where they were trapped without water. In 2016 a UN commission of inquiry concluded that ISIS had committed genocide against the Yazidis.

ISIS also expelled or killed Christians, Shia Muslims and other minorities, and executed Sunnis who opposed it. It staged and filmed executions of captured soldiers and foreign hostages, beginning with the American journalist James Foley in August 2014, and spread the videos online. It destroyed ancient sites and artefacts, including statues in the Mosul Museum and much of Nimrud in 2015, and at Palmyra in Syria it blew up the temples of Baalshamin and Bel and murdered the retired antiquities chief Khaled al-Asaad.

How the Islamic State worked

At its peak in late 2014 and 2015, the Islamic State controlled territory often estimated at around 88,000 to 100,000 square kilometres, stretching from near Aleppo in Syria to the outskirts of Baghdad, with a population variously estimated at between about 8 and 10 million. It ran courts, police, schools and services, imposed its harsh interpretation of Islamic law and issued its own coins.

Its income came from selling oil from captured fields, taxing and extorting the population, looting banks, kidnapping for ransom and trading antiquities. Its slick propaganda, published in several languages through magazines and social media, drew tens of thousands of foreign recruits; a UN estimate put the number of foreign fighters who joined jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria at more than 40,000 from over 110 countries.

War against the Islamic State

The United States began airstrikes in Iraq on 8 August 2014, partly to protect Yazidis on Mount Sinjar and the Kurdish capital, Erbil, and extended them to Syria in September. A Global Coalition against Daesh was formed that autumn and eventually included more than 80 members. Kurdish fighters held the Syrian border town of Kobani after a four-month siege that ended in January 2015.

ISIS still gained ground in 2015, taking Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria in May. It also turned to attacks abroad, directly or by inspiring supporters. These included the bombing of a Russian airliner over Sinai on 31 October 2015, which killed 224 people; the Paris attacks of 13 November 2015, which killed 130; the Brussels bombings of March 2016; and the truck attack in Nice in July 2016. Russia, which intervened in Syria in September 2015, also bombed ISIS, though mostly targeted other rebel groups.

From 2015 the tide turned. Iraqi forces retook Tikrit, Ramadi and Fallujah, and on 17 October 2016 they launched the offensive to recapture Mosul. The battle lasted nine months, with intense street fighting in the dense Old City; ISIS blew up the al-Nuri mosque in June 2017, and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory on 10 July 2017. Thousands of civilians died, with independent estimates of around 9,000 to 11,000. In Syria the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces captured Raqqa on 17 October 2017.

Collapse and aftermath

Iraq declared final victory over ISIS on 9 December 2017. The remaining fighters were pushed down the Euphrates valley in Syria until the last pocket, the village of Baghuz, fell to the Syrian Democratic Forces on 23 March 2019. On 26-27 October 2019 Baghdadi killed himself during a US special forces raid on his hideout in Idlib province, in north-western Syria.

The group did not disappear. It continued a low-level insurgency of ambushes and bombings in Iraq and Syria, and affiliates calling themselves provinces of the Islamic State remained active in West Africa, the Sahel, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Afghanistan, where ISIS-Khorasan carried out major attacks. Tens of thousands of suspected members and their families, many of them children, were held in camps such as al-Hol in north-east Syria.

Consequences and legacy

The war against ISIS left Mosul, Raqqa and many other towns in ruins and displaced millions of people. Mass graves are still being excavated in Sinjar, and thousands of Yazidis remained missing years later. The crisis contributed to the flow of refugees that culminated in the European migrant crisis of 2015 and fuelled fears of terrorism in Europe and North America.

ISIS also changed jihadist movements. Unlike al-Qaeda, which had treated the creation of a state as a distant goal, it tried to build one immediately and to provoke an apocalyptic confrontation with the West. Its rapid rise has been blamed on several factors that historians still debate: the legacy of the 2003 invasion and the dismantling of Iraq’s army, sectarian politics in Baghdad, the Syrian war, and the withdrawal of US forces.

Timeline

• 2004, October: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group pledges allegiance to al-Qaeda, becoming al-Qaeda in Iraq.
• 2006, 7 June: Zarqawi is killed in a US airstrike; in October the Islamic State of Iraq is declared.
• 2010, May: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi becomes leader.
• 2013, April: Baghdadi announces the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).
• 2014, 10 June: ISIS captures Mosul.
• 2014, 29 June: ISIS declares a caliphate and renames itself the Islamic State.
• 2014, 3 August: ISIS attacks Sinjar and begins the genocide of the Yazidis.
• 2014, 8 August: The United States begins airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq.
• 2017, 10 July: Iraq declares Mosul liberated; Raqqa falls on 17 October.
• 2019, 23 March: The Syrian Democratic Forces capture Baghuz, ISIS’s last territory.

Why it matters

The Islamic State was the most successful jihadist attempt to seize and govern territory in modern times, and its atrocities, from the Yazidi genocide to attacks on civilians abroad, shaped politics in the Middle East, Europe and North America. Its story connects the consequences of the 2003 Iraq war and the Arab Spring and shows how state collapse can allow extremist movements to grow with astonishing speed.