17 Cards
EDITED BY Zack Beauchamp
2014-12-16 15:20:29 -0500
Card 1 of 17
Card 2 of 17
Since pledging allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2004, the group's goal has been remarkably consistent: found a hardline Sunni Islamic state. As General Ray Odierno puts it: "They want complete failure of the government in Iraq. They want to establish a caliphate in Iraq." Even after ISIS split with al-Qaeda in February 2014 (in large part because ISIS was too brutal even for al-Qaeda), ISIS's goal remained the same.
Today, ISIS holds a fair amount of territory in both Iraq and Syria — a mass roughly the size of the United Kingdom. One ISIS map, from 2006, shows its ambitions stopping there — though interestingly overlapping with a lot of oil fields:

(ISIS/Aaron Zelin)
Another shows its ambitions stretching across the Middle East, and some have apparently even included territory in North Africa:

(Ali Soufan/ISIS)
Now, ISIS has no chance of accomplishing any of these things in the foreseeable future. It isn't even strong enough to topple the Syrian government at present, and it's actually losing territory in Iraq. But these maps do tell us something important about ISIS: they're incredibly ambitious, they think ahead, and they're quite serious about their expansionist Islamist ideology.
Card 3 of 17
Card 4 of 17
Card 5 of 17
Card 6 of 17
Card 7 of 17
Card 8 of 17
Card 9 of 17
Card 10 of 17
Card 11 of 17
Card 12 of 17
Card 13 of 17
Card 14 of 17
Card 15 of 17
Card 16 of 17
Card 17 of 17
| T | F | G |
| Y | O |
If you currently have a username with "@" in it, please email support@voxmedia.com.
We'll email you a reset link.
If you signed up using a 3rd party account like Facebook or Twitter, please login with it instead.
We'll email it to you.
If you signed up using a 3rd party account like Facebook or Twitter, please login with it instead.
If you signed up using a 3rd party account like Facebook or Twitter, please login with it instead.
Try another email?If you signed up using a 3rd party account like Facebook or Twitter, please login with it instead.
Try another email?
Choose an available username to complete sign up.
In order to provide our users with a better overall experience, we ask for more information from Facebook when using it to login so that we can learn more about our audience and provide you with the best possible experience. We do not store specific user data and the sharing of it is not required to login with Facebook.