In the late 1980s, two new leaders became prominent in radical Islam: Osama bin Laden from Saudi Arabia and Ayman al-Zawahiri from Egypt. Both of these men followed the ideology of a teacher named, Abdullah Azzam. The Investigative Project on…
Read MoreTwo years ago on June 29, 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of ISIS, declared that he was the head of the Caliphate. A Caliphate is an Islamic state led by a religious and political leader called a Caliph. The Caliph…
Read MoreDuring the 2012 U.S. Presidential campaign, President Obama announced at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, “Al-Qaeda has been ‘decimated.’” A little over a year later, after ISIS had captured Fallujah, a reporter from The New Yorker pointed out that the…
Read MoreThree of the most important Islamic spiritual authorities in the West are Australian Musa Cerantonio, British Anjem Choudary, and American Ahmad Musa Jibril. These three have been instrumental in encouraging jihadis to join ISIS by spreading the same fundamental Islamist message…
Read MoreIn June of 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of ISIS, announced the formation of an Islamic caliphate called the Islamic State. The Islamic State has been quite successful in its attempts to recruit fighters for its cause in Iraq and…
Read MoreWho is Daesh? Daesh is the jihadi group known as ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), or ISIL (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) or as the group likes to refer to itself as simply the…
Read MoreAs Christians and Muslims gathered in a Baghdad church on Sunday afternoon, Manhal Younis cried and said, “I can’t feel my identity as an Iraqi Christian.” The woman next to her in the pew, a Muslim, reached out to her…
Read MoreIt is not a new phenomenon for Muslims in the West to travel to areas around the world to engage in jihad, however with the ongoing war in Syria and the recent announcement of the formation of a new caliphate…
Read MoreMuch attention has been focused in recent weeks on the nation of Iraq. News commentators have debated the West’s role in Iraq while much of the nation has fallen under the control a former al-Qaeda ally, the Islamic State of…
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