The Jihadist Preachers of the End Times

The rapid territorial conquests of Islamic State (IS) in 2014 and 2015, chiefly the fall of Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul in June 2014, shocked the world and brought to international attention the most recent iteration of the militant organisation founded by the late Abu Mus[ab al-Zarqawi in 2002–2003. Evolving from al-Zarqawi’s original group, the Jama[at al-Tawhid wa’l-Jihad, the organisation morphed later into Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers/Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, and eventually by 2014 just IS. From its early days the organisation embraced elements of militant apocalypticism but its most clear-cut and extreme endorsement of messianism did not occur until the advent of IS as a proto-state insurgent governing power ruling vast swaths not only of Iraq and Syria but also other parts of the world through its affiliate branches including in Libya, Yemen, West Africa (particularly in north-eastern Nigeria and around the Lake Chad region that includes Niger, Chad, and Cameroon), and Afghanistan. Capturing areas of Syria associated with the end times in Islamic apocalyptic texts including Hadith, like the otherwise strategically unimportant town of Dabiq, IS placed itself at the centre stage of contemporary militant Islamist apocalypticism. The role of specific geography in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East and wider Muslim world, such as “Khurasan,” to the IS narrative is covered in detail in Chapter Three.