ISIS Proclaims Caliphate
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate on 29 June 2014, and appeared in the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul days later to claim the title of caliph for the first time in ninety years. The organisation had begun as al-Qaeda in Iraq under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had been reduced to almost nothing by the American surge and the Sunni Awakening by 2010, and had rebuilt in the Syrian war and in the sectarian politics of Nouri al-Maliki's Iraq, whose exclusion of Sunnis supplied both grievance and recruits. It took Fallujah in January 2014 and Mosul in June, where several Iraqi divisions dissolved in front of a far smaller force, abandoning American equipment. At its height it controlled territory across Syria and Iraq with a population of some eight million, and it governed rather than merely raided: courts, taxation, schools, a bureaucracy, and oil sales. It was distinguished from al-Qaeda by holding ground, by declaring the caliphate unilaterally, and by publicising its atrocities as strategy — mass executions filmed in high definition, the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot, and the genocide of the Yazidis of Sinjar in August 2014, in which thousands of men were killed and thousands of women enslaved. A coalition of some eighty states, Kurdish forces, Iraqi units and Iranian-backed militias fought it for four years. Mosul fell in July 2017 after nine months, Raqqa in October, and the last territory at Baghuz in March 2019. Baghdadi killed himself in a raid that October. The organisation survives as an insurgency in Iraq and Syria and through affiliates in the Sahel, Afghanistan and elsewhere, several of which are now more active than the original. Tens of thousands of its members and their families remain in camps in north-east Syria with no state willing to take them. The Yazidi genocide has been formally recognised by several parliaments and by a UN investigative team.
- Year: 2014 CE
- Category: Political
