Cartographies of fear: Who wants a bigger Caliphate than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?
Over the past few months the al-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah fī al-ʻIrāq wa-al-Shām (ISIS or ISIL) , the jihadist militant group active primarily in Syria, swept through the Syrian-Iraqi border and, benefiting from the support and know-how of some of Saddam Hussein's army officers, pressed on for Baghdad virtually through the Mosul and Tikrit highway. Its unprecedented success was too good not to make maximum use of. ISIS promptly renamed itself al-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah - Islamic State - shedding its limiting territorial aspirations of its earlier phase. It did so by proclaiming the end of the territorial demarcation of the Middle East that came to be known as the Sykes-Picot agreement and by designating itself as the modern-day Caliphate. To add to the gravity of this emotionally loaded move, the establishment of this new Caliphate was said to be proclaimed 'one hundred years from the start of the dismantling of the last - Ottoman - caliphate', a claim that, ...