Ripple effect of ISIS: What you need to know about mounting unrest around the world

By Scott Lucas

Monday, Dec. 7, 2015 | 2 a.m.

It has been more than a decade since the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, but violence related to the Middle East continues, as evidenced by the recent attacks in Paris that killed 130 people at restaurants, a concert hall and a soccer stadium.

Who is perpetrating these atrocities? And what do they want?

Here is what you need to know about the terrorist organization that carried out the Paris attacks, the cause and consequences of the group’s actions, and the road ahead.

Who is ISIS and what do they want?

The Islamic State is a terrorist organization that controls territory in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya. Its goal is to wipe away colonially imposed borders that divide the Middle East and establish a theocratic rule before the end of the world, which members believe will begin with a battle between Christians and Islamic State Muslims in the Syrian town of Dabiq. To win the battle and destroy the Crusaders, members believe the Islamic State must be a caliphate (a form of government led by a political and religious successor to the Islamic prophet, Muhammad). But claims by the group of any religious or political authority have been roundly rejected throughout the Muslim world, by liberal and conservative believers alike, as well as by other states governed by Islamic leaders. Adhering takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State also is committed to purifying the world of sinners and apostates by killing vast numbers of people.

How bad are their war crimes?

Bad. The group has executed more than 3,000 people since taking power, including

opposition fighters, civilians and journalists. Members also sexually enslave women,

including thousands of members of the minority Yazidi community and an American aid worker,

Kayla Mueller, whom the Islamic State’s leader repeatedly raped and tortured before her death. The Islamic State also has threatened to carry out genocide against religious minorities in the territories it controls and massacred thousands of Yazidi men in 2014. Survivors fled to a nearby mountain and were rescued by Kurdish and American forces. In recent years, Islamic State operatives also are responsible for many other acts of terrorism around the world, including the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, the suicide bombings Nov. 12 in Beirut and Oct. 10 in Ankara, Turkey, and the Oct. 31 downing of a Russian jet, killing all 214 people aboard.

How did the Islamic State emerge?

Extremist Muslims have been fighting against the secular states that colonial powers carved the Middle East into since the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Al-Qaida, for instance, is as opposed to the government of Saudi Arabia as it is to the United States. After the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Sunni jihadists organized resistance groups that later became the Islamic State. When the Arab Spring — a mixture of liberal and religious uprisings against autocracies throughout the region — began in 2011, national protests degraded into a civil war in Syria, which pitted government forces, including the Shia, against Sunni-dominated rebel groups. By late 2013, the Islamic State managed to sweep aside government forces and other rebel groups to control large swaths of territory in Syria’s interior.

What does ISIS have to do with the Syrian refugee crisis?

The Islamic State violently rules roughly a third of Iraq and a third of Syria, an area with a population of 10 million to 12 million people. Its control of territory, in addition to Syria’s civil war, has caused more than 4 million refugees to flee in search of safer countries, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

So where are the refugees going?

Above are just a few of the countries accepting refugees and how many. The majority have fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, but these numbers include only refufees who registered with the UNHCR. It does not include the millions of undocumented people estimated to be throughout the region.

So is the Syrian government the good guys?

No, unfortunately. The Syrian government is led by a dictator named Bashar al-Assad, who has carried out numerous war crimes, including the use of sarin gas. Although the Syrian government enjoys support from Russia, the United States and other Western powers have refused to back it.

How does the Islamic State function?

Nicknamed “the invisible sheikh” for his low public profile, the leader, or self-proclaimed caliph, of the Islamic State is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

According to a biography released by the Islamic State, he received a Ph.D. in Islamic studies from the Islamic University in Baghdad. Born in 1971 in Samarra, 50 miles north of Baghdad, al-Baghdadi is believed to have been a student at the time of the American-led invasion in 2003.

In 2005, he was captured by coalition forces as a mid-ranking member of a resistance group. A Salafist — a fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam that included Osama bin Laden — al-Baghdadi joined the precursor to the Islamic State, rising through its ranks before assuming control of the organization in 2010 after the death of its previous leader.

Is the Islamic State the same as ISIS?

The different names designate the same group, although each carries different connotations.

Originally, the organization called itself ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah fi‘l-Iraq wa-sh-Sham, which in Arabic translates either as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. That’s where the acronyms ISIS and ISIL come from.

On June 29, 2014, the group’s leader declared the organization a caliphate — an Islamic state presided over by a religious leader — named the Islamic State.

Enemies of the group, especially those who speak Arabic, use the name DAESH, an acronym based on the organization’s original name. The acronym is insulting because in Arabic, it sounds like the word for “sowers of discord” or enemies of Islam.

Is the Islamic State the same as al-Qaida?

No. Although the two groups spring from the same ideological source, their paths have diverged, at times violently.

The two groups fight viciously over recruits, financing and notoriety. In fact, on Nov. 15, an al-Qaida suicide bomber killed six leaders of an Islamic State brigade near the Golan Heights. Analyists also speculate that a Nov. 20 attack that killed 20 people in a hotel in Mali may have been an al-Qaida attempt to seize the spotlight back from the Islamic State.

Although the Islamic State grew from an al-Qaida affiliate in Iraq lead by Abu Musa’b al Zarqawi, who was killed in 2006, the groups broke over the Islamic States’ practice of takfir, or excommunication, which the Islamic State practices far more extensively than al-Qaida. The Islamic State also emphasizes the apocalypse more than al-Qaida does, and in declaring itself a caliphate, took a step that Osama Bin Laden never did.

Today, the Islamic State musters more power than al-Qaida.

Is the Islamic State a government, a religious group or a cult?

At times, it behaves like a rational actor, but it also operates like a millenarian cult.

Its leaders have backed off slightly from an early assumption of an imminent apocalypse and have thrown themselves into building structures — a legal code, taxation, a military and control of territory — that mark a modern political system. Where it holds power, the Islamic State collects taxes, regulates prices, operates courts and administers services such as health care, education and telecommunications.

Leaders take advantage of forms of post-modernity: transnational flows of people, capital, technology and information. Yet, all of it comes in service to ideas and practices that are explicitly backward-looking.

Did the Iraq War cause this?

In a sense, yes, but it’s more complicated than that. The Islamic State’s membership includes former Baathists, or members of Saddam Hussein’s secular party, as well as religious extremists. Before the American invasion, the groups were political opponents. In fact, despite many Americans’ misconception that Saddam either directly carried out the 9/11 attacks or gave support to the al-Qaida militants who did, the groups had nothing to do with one another before the invasion. Many experts argue the turmoil caused by the invasion created fertile ground for the growth of the Islamic State. “It’s clearly the case that the invasion of Iraq, or more importantly what happened afterwards, is a significant factor in understanding the current situation in the country,” former foreign secretary of the United Kingdom David Miliband said in 2014. (Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, however, disagrees.) Some military analysts argue that the decision by the Bush administration to disband the Iraqi army in 2003 left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis armed and out of work, many of whom later joined the Islamic State. Critics of the Obama administration charge that the president’s decision in 2011 to withdraw American forces during a time of relative stability allowed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shia, to pursue sectarian policies that fueled the Sunni uprising in 2014, which allowed the Islamic State to flourish.

What can we do about these terrorists?

Obama’s approach toward ISIS is two-pronged: airstrikes and using the Iraqi military and moderate Syrian rebels as proxies, with the long-term goal of containing and degrading the Islamic State. The United States has stationed 3,550 military personnel in Iraq and has authorized 50 special operations forces in Syria. The goal is to keep the organization in check while local forces defeat it. But even the president’s defenders admit that hasn’t worked yet. What we should do instead is harder to figure out.

Neoconservative critics of the president, including some of the architects of the Iraq War, have called for a more robust American intervention. Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, called for up to 50,000 American ground troops to “uproot” the Islamic State and remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton argued that after the removal of the Islamic State, the United States should assent to a breakup of Iraq’s current borders in favor of an independent Kurdistan in the north and a new Sunni state in parts of Iraq and Syria. But the American public, even after the Paris attacks, doesn’t seem to want to commit tens of thousands to troops to the region again.

Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton has argued for American ground forces, the creation of a no-fly zone and increased military aid to groups that fight the Islamic State, including Kurdish militias and Sunni tribes. Others have argued that the United States’ primary strategy ought to be helping to build a Kurdish state and rolling back Iranian influence in the region.

A French journalist who was held hostage by ISIS for 10 months says military force is the wrong approach. “Strikes on ISIS are a trap,” said Nicolas Henin, who was freed in 2014. “The winner of this war will not be the party that has the newest, the most expensive or the most sophisticated weaponry, but the party that manages to win over the people.” The easiest way to win the hearts of the people, Henin said, is to welcome refugees fleeing from the Islamic State. “What we have to do — and this is really key — is we have to engage the local people,” he said. “As soon as the people have hope for a political solution, the Islamic State will just collapse. … This is why they probably tried to manipulate the public during the Paris attacks — to make us close our borders, and maybe even more importantly, close our minds.”