As a master's-degree student at a university in Baghdad in 1997, Ibrahim Awwad al-Badri al-Samarrai was so poor he took cash handouts every month from a kindly professor, said a former classmate.Keep reading.
Now flush with cash, armed to the teeth and backed by an army known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, he is within striking distance of attacking the city where spent his humble youth. The rise of the militant Islamist leader, who changed his name to Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi in 2010, is a rags-to-riches story that mirrors the rise of the ISIS militia he now leads.
By emphasizing practical gains over ideology and placing a premium on battlefield victories rather than lofty principals, Mr. Baghdadi's ISIS has become one of the most powerful militant Islamist groups, said experts on militant Islamism. For the West, ISIS's strength and identity have created a new sort of enemy that has a reputation for brutality and in many ways looks and acts like the army of a state seeking to expand its territory.
ISIS is "actualizing the idea of the Islamic state. On the jihadi side of things, there's appeal in that," said Aaron Zelin, an expert on Islamist groups at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "You have guys just talking about it and al Qaeda and Jabhat Al Nusra saying they'll get there, whereas ISIS is just doing it," he said, referring to ISIS's rivals in Syria and throughout the world.
While ISIS shares much of the same ideology and jihadist vocabulary as al Qaeda, it differs on methodology. Whereas al Qaeda, which got its start during the resistance against the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s, behaves as a terrorist organization advancing a global ideology, ISIS in many ways acts like the army of a sovereign nation with defined borders and a semi-legitimate system of governance...
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