2014 - The rise of Daesh

LONDON: In June 2014, I was part of the team that launched a new think tank looking at religious extremism. Our patron, the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, had long been concerned that the ideological element of extremist groups was being overlooked and needed more policy-focused research. 

That month, Daesh raced through northern Iraq, routing government troops and capturing a vast amount of territory and materials that would strengthen its new position. On June 29, in the central mosque in Mosul, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the group’s leader, declared himself to be caliph of a new caliphate. 

The world was fascinated and horrified. Most people had never heard of Daesh or were unaware of its links to Al-Qaeda in Iraq during the Iraq War. How had this group come out of nowhere to conquer the north of Iraq, in addition to its territories in Syria? The interest was such that an article I published on our think tank’s website, explaining where the group had come from, was for a while the top result in Google searches. 

For extremists and their sympathizers around the world, this was the moment for which they had been waiting and fighting for many years. Here at last, they thought, was a leader and a group capable of delivering on what it promised. 

Extremists flocked to Daesh in droves. Estimates at the height of the group’s power put the number of foreign fighters who joined its Iraqi and Syrian core at 40,000, with a flow at its peak of up to 2,000 a month. The majority of these foreign fighters were from the Middle East and North Africa, but they included a large number from the West, and South and Southeast Asia as well. 

Throughout modern history, in every kind of social or political movement, new kinds of organizations have emerged that changed the terms of the debate. Al-Qaeda did that with the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Daesh did the same in 2014. 

The use of propaganda by Daesh probably received the most international focus, including the way it showcased of acts of extreme violence, such as the 2015 immolation of Muath Al-Kasasbeh, a Jordanian pilot, and the beheadings of soldiers, journalists and aid workers. 

The group produced slick videos and professionally edited magazines. It created vast networks on social media, playing a game of cat and mouse with the law enforcement agencies and tech companies that attempted to suppress them. 

Efforts to counter Daesh sought to emulate the group’s own tactics, but with very limited success because the majority of these efforts seemed unable to grasp the fact that the production of slick videos was not the point, but merely a mechanism for communicating a message: the caliphate that so many frustrated extremists had longed for was supposedly back. 

Another aspect in which a total change of tactics was in evidence was Daesh’s approach to governance. Other transnational terrorist groups had attempted governance, notably Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the aftermath of 2011. And other extremist groups of various ideological stripes had tried it on a large scale, including the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But Daesh was the first group with an explicitly transnational ideology (it sought to establish a global caliphate) to attempt governance at scale. It sent out calls to doctors and teachers; it announced the launch of a currency, with great fanfare; it encouraged those who traveled to its territory to burn their passports. 

This relates to the third way in which a total change was evident in how this group operated, and the reason why extremists all over the world continue to carry out attacks in its name. 

Daesh’s actions in 2014 had sent out a message across the Islamist world: “We deliver.” For decades, various groups had claimed to seek the establishment of a caliphate. Most observers laughed at this fantasy and instead focused on how the West, in their eyes, might avoid provoking such groups. 

But the actions of Daesh granted it a legitimacy in the eyes of its ideological sympathizers. Fighters from other extremist groups in Syria and Iraq defected to it; the leaders of these groups were mere warlords in comparison to the leadership of Daesh. Groups in several countries, from Nigeria to the Philippines, swore allegiance. And across the Middle East and North Africa, Daesh cells claimed to be expanding its jurisdiction. 

Despite the deaths of successive leaders and loss of its territories, allegiance to the Daesh ideology persists. In Nigeria, the Sinai, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere around the globe, people still claim to be acting in the name of the supposed “caliphate.” 

Such is the power of ideology. When we focus only on personalities, propaganda or territory, we risk missing the most important aspect. It was not Al-Baghdadi’s charismatic personality that drew people to him who had never met him and hardly ever heard him speak, and convinced them to pledge allegiance. If slickly produced films were enough, the world would be rushing to pledge allegiance to Peter Jackson. If territories were the key, support for Daesh would have dried up on the banks of the Euphrates. 

All of these things are certainly important but it is the very idea of the caliphate, and the means through which to achieve it, that holds Daesh’s supporters together.

• Peter Welby is a priest in the Church of England. Previously, he was a consultant on religion and global affairs, specializing in the Arab world, and the managing editor of a think tank on religious extremism, the Centre on Religion and Geopolitics.