The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has in the last week become priority number one for the Obama administration and Congress.
The group has taken over broad swaths of Iraq and Syria and is threatening Baghdad.
{mosads}Its success has caught many by surprise, as Iraq’s army had it outnumbered and seemed to have greater firepower.
Here are six facts about the group.
It is a Sunni militant group
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an area that encompasses the eastern Mediterranean. The group is a predominantly Sunni militant group that originated in Iraq and has spilled over into Syria to challenge both President Bashar al-Assad and the moderate opposition backed by the United States.
Its goal is to create an Islamic state based on Sharia law.
ISIS wants to create a single transnational Islamic state.
The group has already begun instituting new rules in the cities they now control. In Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, ISIS issued an 11-point charter of new laws, incentives and punishments. Cigarettes, alcohol and drugs are illegal, citizens must pray five times a day, women must stay indoors unless there’s an emergency, and thieves risk having their hands amputated.
The group’s founder was killed in a US air strike
The group was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and grew out of al Qaeda in Iraq.
Al-Zarqawi was a leader of al Qaeda in Iraq and was enemy number one for President George W. Bush’s administration until he was killed in an air strike in June, 2006.
Zarqawi was an Arab of Jordanian descent, and had commanded volunteers in Herat, Afghanistan before he fled to northern Iraq in 2001. He founded the terrorist group in 2004 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq a year earlier.
His death marked a turning point for al Qaeda in Iraq. Successor Abu Ayyub al-Masri looked to expand the group locally after the air strike.
The group spun out of al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda in Iraq’s fighters were originally associated with al Qaeda leadership.
They fought alongside the terrorist group and the Taliban in 1999 and after the U.S. launched strikes in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Before the March 2003 Iraq invasion, Bush administration officials warned the United Nations Security Council that the group was linked to Osama bin Laden. The group’s current leader, believed to be in Syria, renamed the group in 2012 to encompass its efforts to prevail in that nation’s civil war.
Congress was warned.
Brett McGurk, deputy assistant secretary for Iran and Iraq, testified about ISIS at a February hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
While violence in Iraq continued past the U.S. pullout in 2011, it didn’t accelerate until 2013, McGurk told lawmakers, as the group began committing more suicide bombings.
“It is incumbent upon the head of state to act in a manner that advances stability in all parts of Iraq. In all of our engagements with [President Nouri al-Maliki], accordingly, including a November meeting with the president, and regular calls from the vice president, we have continued to press the urgency of working with local Sunni leaders to draw the population into the fight against ISIL,” McGurk said.
In early January, McGurk said he met with Maliki and other key leaders and asserted that without a broad base of support “it would be impossible to root out hundreds of ISIL fighters who had taken up positions in strategic areas.”
There is a $10 million reward for ISIS’s current leader
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also known as Abu D’ua, was listed by the State Department as a “specially designated global terrorist” in 2011. It offered a $10 million reward for any information that would lead U.S. officials to him.
It is the second biggest reward the U.S. has offered, the first being one that could help lead to Ayman al-Zawahiri, chief leader of al Qaeda. As of last August, the State Department believed al-Baghdadi was based in Syria.
–This report was updated at 5:55 p.m.