
The Islamic State militant group (ISIS) is an entity that has captivated the world. It adorns the front-pages of the world’s biggest newspapers, the television screens of millions of viewers and the policy notes of the world’s most powerful governments, for all the wrong reasons.
It has risen to become the flag-bearer of the global jihad with a barbaric, medieval ideology that casts a shadow over 21st century borders. But how did we get to this point?
The group’s roots lie in the U.S. occupation of Iraq from 2003 onwards, when Jordanian extremist and ISIS’s spiritual founder Abu Musab Zarqawi pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda, transforming his al-Tawhid wal-Jihad group into Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
Two years later, a U.S. air strike killed Zarqawi and the group is rebranded as the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), bringing together Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda faction with other radical groups. Zarqawi was replaced by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi while Egyptian extremist Abu Ayyub al-Masri became the group’s military commander.
In the following years, the group made Western targets its primary focus in Iraq, particularly U.S. forces, as well as exploiting the instability of the Iraq War to attack the country’s Shia Muslims. A joint Iraqi-U.S. operation killed both al-Baghdadi and al-Masri in 2010. Their replacement was the man who would become the present-day leader of ISIS: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
By Jack Moore, Newsweek, SouthFloridaReporter.com, Feb. 27, 2016
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