June 30, 2015 | Quote

Is ISIS’s Capital City Under Threat?

ISIS is in trouble: Kurdish forces have advanced to within 35 miles of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State's capital.

“The Islamic State is facing perhaps its most serious symbolic and meaningful threat since it declared itself a caliphate almost one year ago,” the Soufan Group, a private intelligence firm focusing on terrorism, writes in a recent briefing.

Will ISIS lose Raqqa? What will happen if it does?

The whole idea of ISIS, the thing that makes it really different from al-Qaeda, is that it claims to be the actual caliphate: an Islamic State that governs and holds territory. It needs that territory to ideologically justify itself, to collect the extortionary “taxes” it uses to fund its activities, and to attract ever more foreign recruits.

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“When they declared the caliphate, their legitimacy came to rest on the continuing viability of their state,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me in October.

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Issues:

Al Qaeda Syria