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• The Islamic State – also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh – emerged from the remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a local offshoot of al Qaeda founded by Abu Musab al Zarqawi in 2004
• It faded into obscurity for several years after the surge of U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007
• But it began to reemerge in 2011
• Over the next few years, it took advantage of growing instability in Iraq and Syria to carry out attacks and bolster its ranks
• Timeline: the Rise, Spread and Fall of the Islamic State

  1. The group changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2013

  2. ISIS launched an offensive on Mosul and Tikrit in June 2014

  3. On June 29, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced the formation of a caliphate stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq, and renamed the group the Islamic State

  4. A U.S.-led coalition began airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq on August 7, 2014, and expanded the campaign to Syria the following month

  5. On October 15, the United States named the campaign "Operation Inherent Resolve"

  6. Over the next year, the United States conducted more than 8,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria

  7. ISIS suffered key losses along Syria's border with Turkey, and by the end of 2015, Iraqi forces had made progress in recapturing Ramadi

  8. But in Syria, ISIS made gains near Aleppo, and still firmly held Raqqa and other strongholds

  9. In 2015, ISIS expanded into a network of affiliates in at least eight other countries

  10. Its branches, supporters, and affiliates increasingly carried out attacks beyond the borders of its so-called caliphate

  11. In October, ISIS's Egypt affiliate bombed a Russian airplane, killing 224 people

  12. On November 13, 130 people were killed and more than 300 injured in a series of coordinated attacks in Paris

  13. And in June 2016, a gunman who pledged support to ISIS killed at least four dozen people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida

  14. By December 2017, the ISIS caliphate had lost 95 percent of its territory, including its two biggest properties, Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, and the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, its nominal capital

  15. The Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi declared victory over the Islamic State in Iraq on December 9, 2017

  16. But ISIS was still inspiring and carrying out attacks all over the world, including New York City
• When Mohammed Atta boarded the airline on September 11, 2001 that soon thereafter slammed into the World Trade Center towers, he left behind a manual of instruction
• Apparently prepared by his colleagues in the al Qaeda network, it instructed him and his fellow activists how to behave and what to do in preparation for their fateful act
• What is interesting about this document is not only the text, but the subtext
• Lying beneath the pious rhetoric of the manual and its eerie ties to the World Trade Center tragedy are hints about the perplexing issue of the role of religion in the contemporary world, and answers to the persistent question, how could religion be related to such vicious acts of political violence?
• Common sense answers to the question "what's religion got to do with it?"


  • Some political leaders—along with many scholars of comparative religion—have assured us that religion has had nothing to do with these vicious acts, and that religion's innocent images have been used in perverse ways by evil and essentially irreligious political actors
  • There are the radio talk show hosts and even a few social scientists who affirm that religion, especially Islam, has had everything to do with it—and not just ordinary religion, but a perverse strain of fundamentalism that has infected normal religion and caused it to go bad
• In this sense, then, the attack on the World Trade Center was very religious. It was meant to be catastrophic, an act of biblical proportions
• Though the World Trade Center assault and many other recent acts of religious terrorism have no obvious military goal, they are meant to make a powerful impact on the public consciousness
• These are acts meant for television. They are a kind of perverse performance of power meant to ennoble the perpetrators' views of the world and to draw us into their notions of cosmic war
• The September 11 attack and many other recent acts of religious terrorism are skirmishes in what their perpetrators conceive to be a global war
• This battle is global in three senses

  • The choices of targets have often been transnational. The World Trade Center employees killed in the September 11 assault were citizens of 86 nations
  • The network of perpetrators was also transnational: the al Qaeda network that was implicated in the attack--though consisting mostly of Saudis--is also actively supported by Pakistanis, Egyptians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Algerians, Indonesians, Malaysians, Filipinos, and a smattering of British, French, Germans, Spanish and Americans
  • The incident was global in its impact, in large part because of the worldwide and instantaneous coverage of transnational news media. This has been terrorism meant not only for television but for global news networks such as CNN--and especially for al Jazeera, the Qatar based news channel that beams its talk-show format throughout the Middle East
• Such religious warfare not only gives individuals who have engaged in it the illusion of empowerment, it also gives religious organizations and ideas a public attention and importance that they have not enjoyed for many years
• Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein: '"seems like a textbook example of ethnic cleansing"'
• In modern America and Europe, the warfare has given religion a prominence in public life that it has not held since before the Enlightenment, more than two centuries ago
• Myanmar will not allow investigators to fully assess what's happening to the Muslim Rohingya community
• 3 Common Attitudes Of Violent Religious Movements In Society

  • They reject the compromises with liberal values and secular institutions that most mainstream religion has made, be it Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist
  • They refuse to observe the boundaries that secular society has set around religion--keeping it private rather than allowing it to intrude into public spaces
  • They try to create a new form of religiosity that rejects what they regard as weak modern substitutes for the more vibrant and demanding forms of religion that they imagine to be essential to their religion's origins
• The government of Aung San Suu Kyi swears troops are going after only "terrorist" militants and doing their best to spare civilians, but members of the ethnic group fleeing the country tell a much different story of scorched villages of mass killings
• As of Tuesday, about 370,000 had crossed the border into Bangladesh
• Migration of faiths across the globe has been a major feature of the world throughout the 20th century
• The US joined those criticizing the military operation, saying "The massive displacement and victimization of people ... shows that Burmese security forces are not protecting civilians"
• Transnational religion emerged through the post-World War II
• Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina visited refugees in makeshift camps and implored Myanmar to allow them to return safely, saying "Hundreds of years they are staying there. How they can deny that they are not their citizens?"
• China said it backed the Myanmar government's moves toward "stability"
• Two distinct blends of religious universalism and local particularism


  • It is possible for religious universalism to gain the upper hand, whereby religion becomes the central reference for immigrants. Religion transnationalism- "religion going global"
  • It is possible for local ethnic or national particularism to gain or maintain the most important place for local immigrant communities
• More than 400,000 people have signed a petition seeking to have Suu Kyi's Nobel Peace Prize withdrawn
• Religious ideas, values, symbols and rites relate to deep issues of existence; it should not be surprising when religion enters the picture in times of crisis
• China hit back with its own proposed tariffs on 106 American products accounting for around $50 billion in trade, raising fears of an all-out trade war between the world's two biggest economies
• The emergence of globalization brought with it three (3) enormous problems

  • Identity
  • Accountability
  • Security
• The new categories of American goods that would face tariffs include aircraft, soybeans, and cars, which were last year's three biggest exports from the US to China
• Religion provides answer to these concerns
• A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Beijing slammed Trump's approach to trade issues, saying "Those who attempt to make China surrender through pressure or intimidation have never succeeded before, and will not succeed now"
• Sources tell the Wall Street Journal that many of the 106 items on China's list, including sorghum and beef, were included in an attempt to target states that voted for Trump
• China hasn't said when its tariffs will take effect, and the US tariffs are not due to take effect until May 11 at the earliest
• The UN's human right chief just went there on myanmar seems like a textbook example of ethnic cleansing
• Rohingya Muslims are still awaiting justice and protection of their rights five years after the Myanmar military began a sweeping campaign of massacres, rape, and arson in northern Rakhine State on August 25, 2017
• More than 730,000 Rohingya fled to precarious, flood-prone camps in Bangladesh, while about 600,000 remain under oppressive rule in Myanmar