The immediate origins of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) lie in the opportunity spaces provided by two bitter civil wars that challenged the existing state system and borders created by the Sykes-Picot Agreement of World War I: (1) The bloody Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq that followed the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and (2) the even more horrific civil war that has been raging in Syria since 2111. Inspired by al-Qaeda’s atavistic yet modern-based militant stance against perceived American dominance, a significant sector of Iraq’s formerly ruling but now dispossessed Sunni Arabs created al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) to regain their lost power from the U.S. newly-created Shia-dominated government in Iraq. Although repeatedly hammered by U.S. military might that included both total air supremacy that even killed AQI’s then leader Musab al-Zarqawi and the latest technology possible for boots on the ground, the United States and its Shia-dominated Iraqi partners only managed finally to (temporarily as it turned out) defeat AQI by using political and financial rewards to peel off significant Sunni support for this most dedicated al-Qaeda off-shoot. Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s failure to continue politically engaging his state’s still powerful, but dispossessed Sunnis, allowed AQI to resurrect and reinvent itself, especially after the United States withdrew its ground troops from Iraq at the end of 2011.

At the same time Syria’s civil war of all against all had begun. The porous artificial state border between Iraq and Syria allowed the revitalized AQI sanctuary and soon bases in Syria from which the newly reborn movement now known as ISIS or ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) could move with relative ease out of the putative control of Syria and/or Iraq. Sanctuary and bases had already been procured in Iraq due to al-Maliki’s alienating Iraq’s Sunni citizens.

However, ISIS did not immediately emerge as an existential threat. Initial battles against other al-Qaeda off-shoots including its official Syrian franchise Jablat al-Nusra, more moderate Islamic groups, the supposedly more secular Free Syrian Army, Bashar al-Assad’s reduced but still formidable forces, and, Syria’s Kurds now largely under the leadership of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) sister party, occurred. ISIS persevered and at times showed formidable strength, but never to the extent it did in June 2014 when it suddenly burst out of its interior confines and conquered Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. This major success presented the organization with large swaths of territory, a great deal of money supposedly seized from Mosul’s central bank, some of the latest U.S. military equipment captured from Baghdad’s U.S.-supplied and trained but beaten troops, and a supportive Sunni Arab population. The achievement also led ISIS to declare itself a new caliphate and change its name to the Islamic State (IS) with its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as a self-proclaimed caliph. Its enemies, however, began calling the organization the Daesh, an Arab acronym for Al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham or ISIS, a term that also sounded like the word for crush and quickly became a derogatory expression. How had ISIS become so powerful and why is it proving so difficult to defeat?

Michael M. Gunter is a professor of political science at Tennessee Tech. Most of this article is based on the Dr. Gunter’s findings during his visit to the Iraqi Kurdish region in late September 2014 and his earlier background research on the situation in Syria recently published as Michael M. Gunter, Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War (London: Hurst Publishers Ltd., 2014).