ISIL

Since the outbreak of the revolution in Syria in 2011 and the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the already fragile geopolitical balance of the Middle East has seen a quick decline. The rapid escalation of the conflict has led to an unprecedented political and humanitarian crisis in Syria, to which many Western countries answered poorly. At the same time, since 2013, ISIL launched its project to conquer the Middle East and establish an Islamic Caliphate, taking advantage of the difficult situation in the region to put forward its political plan. With Syria in flames and Iraqi militias (especially at first) on the run, the Kurdish population living in the so-called Kurdistan proved to be one of the most relevant actors in the region, particularly the Syrian Kurds who gradually assumed a strategic role in the long-standing crisis, both politically and military. Upon these premises, the report aims to analyse the Syrian crisis from the perspective of what has turned out to be one of the leading actors in the conflict – the Kurds. Through an in-depth study of the decisive role that they have played so far in the Syrian conflict – including their military capacity in fighting the Islamic State, their disputed participation in the peace process as well as their allocation in a possible post-Assad scenario – and the careful scrutiny of international sources and documents on the subject, the paper finally concludes with a few critical observations on the conceivable asset that may be implemented in Syria after the end of the conflict and the potential outcomes for the Kurds.

This article examines the heritage destruction undertaken by the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. To date, their iconoclasm has been mostly characterised either as acts of wanton barbarism devoid of religious or political justification, or as a cynical performance designed as a mass media spectacle. Drawing on a systematic analysis of two key IS propaganda outlets – their on-line magazine, Dabiq, and the various slick films released by Al-Hayat – this article argues that the heritage destruction perpetrated by the IS are not only situated within a carefully articulated theological framework and key to the creation of a new and ideologically pure ‘Islamic State’, but that they are also constituted by several complex layers of religious and political iconoclasm. To demonstrate, this article documents the iconoclasm undertaken by the IS along two key axes: Symbolic Sectarianism (Shia and Sufi mosques and shrines); and Pre-Monotheistic Iconoclasm (ancient polytheistic sites). Attacks on key sites within these categories, such as the Sayyida Zaynab shrine in Damascus or the Mosul Museum, not only adhere to their religious and political framework but also serve broader geo-political agendas and are attacked as proxy targets for their physical and ideological opponents.

The so-called Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) used the hadith mentioning that "the slave-girl will give birth to her master" to justify its renewal of sexual slavery. This hadith is talking about signs before the end of the world, so it could be interpreted by the same Temple theology technique that has been used in the biblical book of Revelation, which is also about the end of the world. "Temple theology" refers to the fact that many obscure and bizarre texts symbolically describe the rituals and politics of the Temple in Jerusalem. Thus, it will be argued that the whole hadith is talking about events that happened prior to the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE (the Temple symbolized the world, so the end of the world refers to this incident). In particular, it will be shown that slave-girl refers to the Virgin Mary giving birth to Christ. The hadith is then linked to the start date of the building the Dome of the Rock in 688 CE, which is the year 999/1000 according to the "Seleucid Era" calendar, implying a nearness to a symbolic end of the world. As such, the "Islamic State" has no Islamic basis to use sexual slavery. As an appendix, the Dabiq hadith concerning the conquest of Constantinople is briefly discussed with reference to the possibility that Constantinople did fall to the Muslims before another symbolic end of the world, the year 7000 according to the Byzantine Calendar.

Is it possible that ISIS is using the whole world as their 'edge'? Has western civilization been experiencing sustained attacks utilizing net centric warfare concepts without our even being aware this was happening? If we have been unable to connect the dots because we have not known where to look, or what we were looking for, then it might be easy to miss the fact that our very own command and control concepts have been used against us, so skillfully; we could not disseminate the true nature of the attacks. As western military and police forces, we are trained to be consumed with immediate action drills for tactical physical responses, for each separate individual occurrence, oblivious to the fact that each isolated incident is actually a force multiplier in a larger scheme of strategic warfare being levied against us. The model of ISIS/ identity warfare is sophisticated in its unsophistication. It is infinitely complex to unravel, because of the nature of its simplicity. Allow individuals to pull what they need to conduct operations, per unit doctrine when and as required, without the necessity for any input, command, initiation or tasking instructions. The larger aim is known to all and self-activation is as effective as large scale, multiple resource plots. They are in fact better, because they stretch resources and confuse the analysts. The only common thing about recent terror attacks is that they are all different. That in itself is an indication that something much larger is at stake. It is possible we are the recipients of a lethal type of net-centric warfare which our existing intelligence infrastructure has been incapable of spotting precisely because defense and law enforcement is trained to fight an enemy it can see. Unconnected things confuse agencies and are dismissed by law enforcement. Connectivity is the very thing which this enemy uses to its advantage because its connected nature and lack of individual physical connection is both its greatest strength and our biggest weakness. We are not configured to deal with unconnected things. Our defense and law enforcement posture is tactical and defensive and applied against a known physical enemy. What if we did not realize that we were on the receiving end of the ultimate hybrid, net-centric enemy? Welcome to the world of nodes and self-synchronization. Welcome to terrorism that we did not realize was terrorism because we did not know what to look for. ISIS' inspired attacks have been buried under assumptions of terrorist organizational structure, connections, relationships and autonomous action. When we look for terrorists we see what we expect to see and label the attacks' lone wolf', 'domestic terrorism 'or 'unconnected,' if and when they do not fit the definitions and expectations of an International terrorist agenda. Such expectations include the existence of 'masterminds' and coordinators who cross the globe, slipping in and out of countries on the direction of a terrorist 'central command'. What if we were under sustained attack by an entity with ultimate organizational agility-an enemy whose edge was the globalized, connected world and net centric warfare was literally using 'the net' not to direct but to share enough information that absolutely anyone with an axe to grind could self-activate, in the name of the cause. In the world of law enforcement the name for this is chaos. The concept of' Power to the edge' in net centric warfare is " the ability of the total force to dynamically synchronize their actions in order to achieve Command and Control (C2) " (Phister and Plonisch 2010) The objective is to shift the center of gravity as far as possible in the network, in

This article suggests that President Obama's consistent references to the extremist Sunni group as ‘ISIL’ (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is not a trivial matter of nomenclature. Instead, the Obama administration's deliberate usage of the ISIL acronym (as opposed to other commonly-used terms such as ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’ or ‘ISIS’, ‘Islamic State’, ‘IS’, ‘so-called Islamic State’ and ‘Daesh’) frames the public perception of the threat to avoid engagement with the requirements of strategy and operations. Both the labelling and the approach could be defended as a response to the unique challenge of a transnational group claiming religious and political legitimacy. However, we suggest that the labelling is an evasion of the necessary response, reflecting instead a lack of coherence in strategy and operations—in particular after the Islamic State's lightning offensive in Iraq and expansion in Syria in mid-2014. This tension between rhetoric, strategy and operations means that ‘ISIL’ does not provide a stable depiction of the Islamic State. While it may draw upon the post-9/11 depiction of ‘terrorism’, the tag leads to dissonance between official and media representations. The administration's depiction of a considered approach leading to victory has been undermined by the abstraction of ‘ISIL’, which in turn produced strategic ambiguity about the prospect of any political, economic or military challenge to the Islamic State.

This article intends to shed light over the reasons for the rise and strengthening of the jihadist group ISIL - The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant - and its activities in Syria and Iraq as well as how the administration of the life of millions of people residing in the territories under its control is managed. Additionally, we seek to clarify the political, historical and social foundations that enabled and fuelled its appearance and current military advances in both countries. It has been verified that ISIS has, fundamentally, political origins and is a reflex of the dismantling of the Iraqi state after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 as well as of the power vacuum instated in Syria in the aftermath of its civil war in 2011.