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D
uring the first six months of 2014, an organization calling
itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched
a major offensive against the government of Iraq. ISIL mili-
tias, armed with weapons from the civil war in neighboring Syria,
captured numerous villages and cities in northern Iraq from gov-
ernment forces. These included the Sunni Muslim strongholds of
Fallujah and Ramadi, as well as the city of Mosul, with more than
a million inhabitants. On June 29, 2014, ISIL’s leaders declared
that the group had established a caliphate, based in Iraq, that
would henceforth have religious, political, and military authority
over all Muslims throughout the world.
The threat of ISIL worried Iraq’s neighbors, such as Saudi
Arabia and Jordan, who feared that the violence would spill over
into their borders. In August 2014, the United States decided to
intervene in the conflict in order to prevent ISIL from carrying out
a program of genocide against the Kurdish people of northern Iraq,
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An aerial view of Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities, which was captured in June 2014 by a ter-
rorist organization calling itself the Islamic State. Iraq has not been stable or peaceful since
the 2003 invasion by an international coalition led the United States to topple dictator
Saddam Hussein. Since 2011, religious and ethnic tensions among Iraqis have been made
worse by the ongoing civil war in neighboring Syria and the rise of the Islamic State.
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