While some world leaders and foreign policy experts expected IS to increase its attacks during COVID-19’s early days, travel bans and curfews helped slow violence.
A group of Islamic State fighters surrender in Afghanistan. Many of their comrades are still in the fight.
Noorullah Shirzada/AFP via Getty Images
The Islamic State group, often called ISIS, is not just based in Iraq and Syria. A scholar tracks where the group and its affiliates have spread around the globe.
A Crusader Castle decoration stone at the Arabic Fortress Citadel in Kerak, Jordan, built in 1142.
Bill Perry/Shutterstock
A young boy is strapped with explosives and sent to detonate himself and those around him at a school. An expert on terrorism explains how and why children become embroiled in militant conflicts.
In seeking to understand the roots of Islamic State, we’ve tried to spread the net wide, but make no claim to being comprehensive or having the final word.
Reuters/Stringer; David Wise/Flickr; Reuters/Stringer; EPA/Sanjeev Gupta; Reuters/Fadi Al-Assaad; Royal Geographical Society/Wikimedia Commons; Reuters/Stringer; AAP/Asmaa Abdelatif; Reuters/Stringer
Our series on understanding Islamic State attempts to catalogue many of the forces and events that can arguably have played a part in creating the conditions necessary for these jihadists to emerge.
Without the perfect-storm conditions of post-invasion insurgency, this most potent expression of al-Qaedaism yet would never have risen to dominate both the Middle East and the world in the way that it does.
Reuters/Stringer
The final article of our series on the historical roots of Islamic State examines the role recent Western intervention in the Middle East played in the group’s inexorable rise.
The century since the first world war is littered with the broken promises of Muslim rulers to bring about a transition to more representative forms of government.
AAP/Asmaa Abdelatif
The rise of Islamic State and its declaration of the caliphate can be read as part of a wider story that has unfolded since the formation of modern nation states in the Muslim world.
Map of the Sykes–Picot Agreement showing Eastern Turkey in Asia, Syria and Western Persia, and areas of control and influence agreed between the British and the French in May 1916.
Royal Geographical Society via Wikimedia Commons
In seeking to link IS to earlier Islamic movements, Western commentators have associated the jihadist group with the medieval Ismailis, made famous in Europe by returning Crusaders as the Assassins.
Islam is a rich and varied religion.
EPA/Sanjeev Gupta
Since Islam is predicated on law, variations in the interpretation of that law – along with geography and distinct legal schools – have all contributed to differences in the religion.
Islamic State fighters on a tank take part in a military parade along the streets of northern Raqqa province.
Reuters/Stringer
How far back in history does one have to go to find the roots of the so-called Islamic State? The first article in our series on the genesis of the terrorist outfit considers some fundamentals.