ArgumentsWhat America Never Understood About ISIS

The Islamic State indulged in some of the most ostentatious brutality and sadism of recent decades. If any extremist group deserves the adjective evil, this would be it. But it is precisely our disgust, which ISIS has well earned, that makes it difficult to talk about what the group was and what it meant—and what it may still mean.

The Washington Post was mocked for describing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as an “austere religious scholar” in the headline of its obituary after the ISIS chief was killed on October 27. (The headline was later changed.) 

Similar criticisms were lobbed against Rukmini Callimachi and Falih Hassan, the authors of a New York Times story about Baghdadi’s death, for describing various government services that ISIS provided in the parts of Iraq and Syria that it once controlled. 

Shadi Hamid writes in The Atlantic that the concern is understandable.

Perhaps talking about ISIS in terms of how it governed rather than how many it killed might provide it with a sheen of legitimacy after the fall of the group’s so-called caliphate. But those wishing to focus almost entirely on the Islamic State’s awfulness—to the exclusion of what made it successful—are falling into an analytical trap. After all, most Americans are presumably already aware that ISIS was a terrorist organization that did terrible things, so it’s not as if highlighting ISIS’s savagery, sex slavery, and killing of innocents fills an important gap in the public discourse. (Anyone unaware of this horrifying record is unlikely to be a reader of The Washington Post or The New York Times in the first place.) But, more important, one can recognize the extent of ISIS’s brutality while also dispassionately discussing its relative effectiveness in certain aspects of governing. The bar for what counts as good governance in Iraq and Syria is quite low.

In 2015, at the height of the group’s savagery, academics and experts did considerable work on how ISIS administered the areas it ruled. The logic was simple: The only way to prevent similar groups from emerging in the future was to understand what made ISIS distinctive. ISIS didn’t come out of nowhere. There were reasons it was able to capture as much territory as it did. And the “marginalia” of governance was part of that story. This can be a blind spot. Western observers assume that brutal groups are bad at governing. This is true sometimes, but the opposite can also be true: The more brutal groups are better at it than the less brutal ones. As Yale’s Mara Revkin explained in perhaps the definitive account of how ISIS governed:

Media coverage of the Islamic State frequently refers to the group’s violent and seemingly archaic justice system without considering the institutional structures that enable this violence, or the broader function that it serves in the group’s ambitious state-building project. Legal institutions make it easier for the group to capture and retain territory by legitimizing its claim to sovereignty, justifying the expropriation of the property and land of enemies, and building goodwill with civilians by ensuring accountability.

The notion that we should call ISIS the worst names we can muster and leave it at that is to set ourselves up for future failure. And that is worth worrying about, since there will be attempts to replicate ISIS’s governance model in the coming decades—even if that seems unlikely in the aftermath of the group’s recent defeats. But we don’t even need to wait. Right in front of us, as we speak, is an example of an extremist group—the Taliban—that effectively mixes brutality and “good (enough) governance” in Afghanistan.