Is the Islamic State going global?

They wouldn’t give details of the program, including how many personnel it is believed to have or its budget.

Here is what you need to know about the group.

So far the group are only known to have used mustard gas during violence in Iraq and Syria, which is usually not lethal.

To the relief of the brands, shops and publications which had been using the name “Isis” long before Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had so much as picked up a rocket launcher, a new name soon emerged. He was named its caliph or the head of the state. Apparently this is an attempt to deny them legitimacy along the lines, heard often by Western commentators, that it is neither Islamic not a state. Think about it. The Islamic State now controls a state as big as the United Kingdom in Iraq and Syria.

What is most urgent is a clear understanding that both Iraq and Syria as unitary states have ceased to exist, that part of a successful strategy must include thinking about what replaces them, and that the way to challenge the negative elements active among their ruins is by supporting the positive elements.

As IS’s statement of responsibility indicated, France was probably chosen as its first Western target because of the government’s active involvement in the anti-IS coalition, its intervention against Islamists in Mali, the state’s strong secularism – which prohibits public displays of religion including the hijab – and the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad, both by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the newspaper Liberation, which republished the notorious Danish cartoons of 2007.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq was known, for a few time, as the Islamic State in Iraq, or ISI.

The important thing to remember is that in this case, Syria and al-Sham are interchangeable, since Syria doesn’t refer to the discrete country drawn on modern maps.

Just finding Syrian rebels willing to fight ISIS is a struggle.

It seized Syrian border crossings to profit from oil smuggling. The game changed in 2014, when the Islamic State broke out from Syria, drove the Iraqi military from the field and proclaimed a worldwide caliphate. Al-Qaeda wanted its subsidiaries and foot soldiers to focus on attacking Western targets, and have increasingly demanded operations which avoid Muslim casualties, in the belief that this would cost them popular support. From Libya to Syria, Iraq to Yemen, the Sinjar Strategy has demonstrably done little to bring success to the USA and its allies in their various wars. A few of the armed groups have withdrawn allegiance from al-Qaeda and pledged loyalty to the ISIS. Our aim in invading Afghanistan in 2001 was to stop terrorism, but we seem only to have spawned more. He was reported to have died in a U.S. drone strike in Syria on November 12. This is a staggering amount of revenue for a terrorist group operating outside the jurisdiction of any transnational organisation. The majority of the group’s money comes from oil sales to local traders from wells under its control.

The Islamic State was on the radar screens of most Americans even before the Paris attacks. The Economist report said ISIS earned at least US$20 million a year ago from ransoms paid for hostages. Civil war has torn apart their country, leaving large areas of terrain with no leadership which is how ISIS was able to spring up so quickly and take hold of Syria.

Most recently, on Friday, the group carried out six coordinated attacks around Paris, killing 129 people and injuring hundreds more. In addition to the Paris attacks, these have included two bombings in Beirut on November 12, and possibly the October 31 bombing of a Russian Metrojet flight over Egypt which was claimed by IS affiliate Wilayat Sinai. In the same way, the undergoing proxy war in Syria is hindering any consensus on how to fight ISIS and regional powers are busy with their own domestic and regional conflicts; the Houthis in Yemen and PKK in Turkey, for example. The executioner in numerous videos, “Jihadi John”, was later identified as British-Arab man Mohammed Emwazi. This takes us to the second administrative body upon which Daesh lavishes a lot of attention: media. Countries backing the USA include Australia, Britain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, Netherlands, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

Their quest raises an alarming scenario for the West, given the determination to strike major cities that the group showed with its bloody attack last week in Paris.

If we’re not careful, their self-declared jihad on ISIS using “self-declared” as a diminutive slur – or “self-styled”, or somesuch variant – could spread like a linguistic virus and, to mix metaphors, wind up choking word flow like kudzu in a Florida inland waterway.

As a result, “it’s going to become more and more hard to differentiate between a pickup truck that is carrying crude oil and a pickup truck that just belongs to a baker or a farmer”.

This article was written by Idayu Suparto from The Straits Times and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.