The Rise of Islamic State Read Online Free PDF

rebels against ISIS now that the US was beginning to be seen as the de facto ally of Assad, whatever its protestations to the contrary.
    In June many people in Baghdad had feared that ISIS would launch an assault on the capital, but the attack never came. As the attention of the world switched to a Malaysian aircraft shot down over Ukraine by Russian-supplied rebels and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that killed 2,000 Palestinians, ISIS consolidated its position in the overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar province that sprawls across western Iraq. In Syria, it defeated or incorporated into its ranks other rebel groups and captured four different Syrian army bases, inflicting heavy casualties and taking much heavy equipment: the worst defeats suffered by the Damascus government in the whole of the uprising.
    The newly declared caliphate was expanding by the day. It now covered an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by some six million people—a population larger than that of Denmark, Finland, or Ireland. In a few weeks of fighting in Syria ISIS had established itself as the dominant force in the Syrian opposition, routing the official al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, in the oil-rich province of Deir Ezzor and executing its local commander as he tried to flee. In northern Syria some 5,000 ISIS fighters were using tanks and artillery captured from the Iraqi army in Mosul to besiege half a million Kurds in their enclave at Kobani on the Turkish border. In central Syria, near Palmyra, ISIS fought the Syrian army as it overran the al-Shaer gas field, one of the largest in the country, in a surprise assault that left an estimated 300 soldiers and civilians dead. Repeated government counterattacks finally retook the gas field, but ISIS still controlled most of Syria’s oil and gas production. The US Air Force was to concentrate on blowing up ISIS oil facilities when it started its bombardment; but a movement that claims to be fulfilling the will of God and makes a cult of martyrdom is not going to go out of business (or even be seriously demoralized) because of a shortage of cash.
    The birth of the new state was the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since theSykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet at first this explosive transformation created surprisingly little alarm internationally, or even among those in Iraq and Syria not yet under the rule of ISIS. Politicians and diplomats tended to treat ISIS as if it is a Bedouin raiding party that appears dramatically from the desert, wins sweeping victories, and then retreats to its strongholds, leaving the status quo little changed. The very speed and unexpectedness of its rise made it tempting for Western and regional leaders to hope that the fall of ISIS and the implosion of the caliphate might be equally sudden and swift. As in any great disaster, people’s moods gyrated between panic and wishful thinking that the calamity was not as bad as first imagined.
    In Baghdad, with its mostly Shia population of seven million, people knew what to expect should the murderously anti-Shia ISIS forces capture the city, but they took heart from the fact that it had not happened yet. “We were frightened by the military disaster at first, but we Baghdadis have got used to crises over the last thirty-five years,” one woman said. Even with ISIS at the gates, Iraqi politicians went on playing political games as they moved ponderously towards replacing the discredited prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
    “It is truly surreal,” a former Iraqi minister said to me. “When you speak to any political leader in Baghdad they talk as if they had not just lost half the country.” Volunteers had gone to the front after a fatwa from the grand ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential Shia cleric. But by July these militiamen were streaming back to their homes, complaining that they were half-starved and forced to use