Twelve years ago on this date, a Syrian militant named Abu Muhammad al-Adnani stood before the world and announced that the group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria had declared a caliphate. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group’s leader, was crowned “caliph of the Muslims.” Within days, propagandists had rebranded him “al-Qurayshi,” tracing a lineage to the Prophet’s clan to lend his title a borrowed legitimacy. Adnani himself posed for the cameras atop the bulldozed Sykes-Picot border between Iraq and Syria, as if erasing a colonial line on a map could erase a century of grievance with it.
At the time, many dismissed this as the theatre of a fringe group. Twelve years on, the ummah is still counting the cost of that miscalculation.
A propaganda machine built for its moment
ISIS did not simply declare a state. It declared a brand and marketed it with a sophistication no jihadist group had managed before. It hijacked the Twitter trends of the 2014 World Cup. It published Dabiq, a glossy English-language magazine that read more like a recruitment brochure than a religious tract. It folded in the aesthetics of video games and the virality of unregulated new media to sell a vision of apocalyptic purpose to anyone willing to listen.
And people listened. Researchers estimate that between 40,000 and 42,000 people travelled from more than 110 countries to join ISIS in Iraq and Syria. That scale demands a harder question than “how were they radicalised.” It demands we ask what pulled them, what pushed them, and whether the governments watching them leave were really as powerless as they claimed.
The complicity nobody wants to discuss
This migration was never entirely secret. In 2015, a man named Mohammed al-Rashed was arrested in Turkey on suspicion of smuggling foreign recruits, including the British schoolgirls who later became infamous as the “Bethnal Green girls,” across the border into ISIS territory. Al-Rashed claimed he had been a paid Canadian intelligence asset, tasked with tracking the network rather than dismantling it. This fits a pattern Western governments have never adequately explained: state after state found it easier to let its disaffected citizens leave for Syria than to confront why they wanted to.
Corporations made their own bargains. The French cement company Lafarge, operating under its Swiss parent Holcim, kept its Syrian plant running through the war by paying ISIS and al-Nusra Front close to six million dollars in an otherwise profit-sharing. Lafarge has since pleaded guilty in a US court to providing material support to a terrorist organisation.
Then there is the American question. Donald Trump, and some of his men, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr, have openly accused previous administrations of being “the founders of ISIS.” Even when a charge of this sort is meant as a rhetorical attack, it nonetheless puts the question of American responsibility into mainstream political discourse. Questions have been seriously asked by historians alike: did the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the dismantling of its army and bureaucracy, and the abuses at Abu Ghraib not manufacture the exact pool of embittered, trained, humiliated men who would go on to staff ISIS’s officer corps? Nobody serious alleges a boardroom conspiracy to build a caliphate. But there is a difference between conspiracy and consequence, and the decisions that reshaped Iraq, broke its institutions, and left a vacuum for ISIS to fill were not accidents of fate. They were policy choices, and policy choices have authors who can be named.
Why people went
The push factors are well documented by now. In Europe, many who travelled to “defend the dawla” came from economically and socially marginalised communities, in societies where Islamophobia is allowed to flourish unchecked. ISIS offered them something Europe had not: the promise of restored honour and a sense of significance. For some, the appeal was barely ideological at all. It was the thrill of a video game made real, gunfire dressed in the language of takbir.
The same forces operated well beyond Europe. People fleeing dictatorial and explicitly anti-Islamic regimes, from Tajikistan to Chinese-occupied East Turkistan, had their own reasons to believe that almost anywhere claiming to be an Islamic state was better than where they stood. And beneath all of this sat a more sincere and less cynical motivation: a genuine, long-starved longing among ordinary Muslims for a unified leadership that would stand for their rights, somewhere, after a century without one.
The ideology that made it possible
ISIS built an entire theology around martyrdom, stripped of the ethical and moral weight that should accompany any discussion of jihad in Islam. Its publications spoke openly of “the wealth of the kafir is halal” and celebrated “the caliphate that killed the tawagheet,” dressing greed and bloodlust in the language of divine reward. This is the hinge on which the whole tragedy turns: a vulnerable, humiliated young man in Brussels or Bukhara is a tragedy of policy and prejudice. The same young man handed a rifle, and a fatwa declaring his own grandmother’s faith insufficient is a tragedy of theology. ISIS did not invent the disenfranchisement it harvested. It supplied the ideological license that turned that disenfranchisement into mass murder, and that license is the part of this story the ummah has been slowest to confront.
That license is the neo-Khawarij current that gave ISIS its theological scaffolding. Like the Khawarij of the first Islamic century, who took up arms against the very Companions of the Prophet over a political dispute they recast as a matter of faith, ISIS made takfir a casual instrument rather than a last resort hedged about by centuries of jurisprudential caution. Fellow Muslims who prayed differently, governed differently, or simply lived under regimes ISIS disapproved of were declared apostates, and their blood was declared lawful. The Prophet showed mercy to the very Quraysh who had exiled and waged war against him for two decades. ISIS could not extend it to Muslims who had done it no wrong at all.
The caliphate that refuses to die
Today, almost nobody asks who the “caliph” is anymore. ISIS lost its territory, and the title became a joke even among those who once took it seriously. But the groups that pledged allegiance to it have outlived the fiction, and the contradiction at the heart of their project has only become more grotesque. In West Africa, ISWAP fighters who claim to be waging jihad for the caliphate have been photographed drinking Coca-Cola on the morning of Eid, even as they kill security personnel and the Muslim civilians they claim to be liberating. ISGS denies the Sahel any peace. Across Central and South Asia, ISKP murders Muslims in territories where Muslims are the overwhelming majority, apparently untroubled by the contradiction. ISCAP, operating in Muslim-minority Central Africa where people might have benefited from sincere da’wah, instead loots and slaughters them.
What caliphate is this, exactly?
A counterfeit, not a Caliphate
The damage ISIS has done extends far beyond the dead, though the dead are reason enough for grief and shame on their own. It has corrupted, perhaps for a generation, the very word “caliphate” in the global imagination. For too many people now, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, the term conjures executions and severed heads rather than its actual meaning.
A true caliphate is a political order rooted in the justice of the Qur’an and the mercy of the Sunnah, and it has a real historical example: the caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab. Umar was a famously severe man, unbending on matters of principle, feared by his own governors for the strictness of his accounting. Yet he is remembered for extending protection and fair treatment to non-Muslim subjects under his rule even while at war with their kin elsewhere. That is the standard a true caliphate is measured against: severity toward injustice, mercy toward the weak, and a ruler who saw himself as a servant of the people he governed rather than their executioner. ISIS never came close to it. It only borrowed the name and buried the meaning beneath it.
*The views expressed in this content are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of İdrakpost.
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