The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) used to have a different name: al Qaeda in Iraq. US troops and allied Sunni militias defeated al Qaeda in Iraq during the post-2006 "surge" — but it didn't destroy them. The US commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, described the group in 2010 as down but "fundamentally the same." In 2011, the group rebooted. ISIS successfully freed a number of prisoners held by the Iraqi government and, slowly but surely, began rebuilding their strength. ISIS and al-Qaeda divorced in February 2014. "Over the years, there have been many signs that the relationship between al Qaeda Central (AQC) and the group's strongest, most unruly franchise was strained," Barack Mendelsohn, a political scientist at Haverford College, writes. Their relationship "had always been more a matter of mutual interests than of shared ideology." According to Mendelsohn, Syria pushed that relationship to the breaking point. ISIS claimed that it controlled Jabhat al-Nusra, the official al-Qaeda splinter in Syria, and defied orders from al-Qaeda's leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to back off. "This was the first time a leader of an al-Qaeda franchise had publicly disobeyed" a movement leader, he says. ISIS also defied repeated orders to kill fewer civilians in Syria, and the tensions led to al-Qaeda disavowing any connection with ISIS in a February communiqué. Today, ISIS and al-Qaeda compete for influence over Islamist extremist groups around the world. Some experts believe ISIS may overtake al-Qaeda as the most influential group in this area globally. ISIS wants to establish a caliphate Their goal since being founded in 2004 has been remarkably consistent: found a hardline Sunni Islamic state. As General Ray Odierno puts it: "They want complete failure of the government in Iraq. They want to establish a caliphate in Iraq." Even after ISIS split with al-Qaeda in February 2014 (in large part because ISIS was too brutal even for al-Qaeda), ISIS' goal remained the same. Today, ISIS holds a fair amount of territory in both Iraq and Syria — a mass roughly the size of Belgium. One ISIS map, from 2006, shows its ambitions stopping there — though interestingly overlapping a lot of oil fields: ISIS funds itself through oil and an extortion racket Unlike some other Islamist groups fighting in Syria, ISIS doesn't depend on foreign aid to survive. In Syria, they've built up something like a mini-state: collecting the equivalent of taxes, selling electricity, and exporting oil to fund its militant activities. My colleague Max Fisher has an in-depth breakdown of how they managed to do this, which includes extorting money from humanitarian workers and selling electricity to the Syrian government that it's currently fighting. There are two important takeaways here. First, as Max explains, these clever revenue bases have made ISIS much more effective on the battlefield than other militant groups: This money goes a long way: it pays better salaries than moderate Syrian rebels or the Syrian and Iraqi professional militaries, both of which have suffered mass desertions. ISIS also appears to enjoy better internal cohesion than any of its state or non-state enemies, at least for the moment. Second, it makes the idea that ISIS' near-term goal is to hold Iraqi oil and power facilities more credible. Check out this ISIS map showing the territory they'd like to hold in Iraq and Syria: Some Americans blame Obama for this There's also a quickly expanding political debate over whether the Obama administration deserves blame for the chaos. The controversy centers around the fact that Obama did not succeed in extending the Bush-era status of forces agreement with Iraq, which stipulated that all US troops had to withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011. The administration tried and failed to negotiate provisions that would have allowed the United States to leave a number of troops there. Conservative critics blame this Obama failure for the current crisis. They say that Obama didn't try very hard to negotiate terms with Maliki. But if he had, they suggested, then US forces could have severely degraded ISIS and prevented this crisis from coming to a head. "A military presence gives the U.S. leverage to shape political outcomes," Reihan Salam, in one of the clearest articulations of this line of criticism, argues. "The fundamental question is whether even a small contingent of U.S. troops might have reassured members of Iraq's minority communities by shielding them from the worst excesses of a Shia-dominated government, thus undermining those calling for its violent overthrow." The administration's defenders counter that major factions in the Iraqi government were dead-set on the US leaving zero troops behind. No plausible amount of persuasion, they say, could have convinced key Iraqi players to back a US presence. What's more, they say, it probably doesn't matter.

• published: 11 Aug 2014
• views: 265