This past semester my Political Science Capstone was a class titled "Force, Diplomacy, and Foreign Policy". During that class, our final project was to break into groups we a common topic or theme and write a paper, with everyone doing their own section, and merging it together. My group, consisting of four students, decided to focus on terrorism. Each of us focused on a specific group: the IRA, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS, with my specific group being ISIS. I focused on the timeline of ISIS: starting with their founding in 2003, going onto their early years, and leading into their resurgence, peak and decline. However, that is not their full story. It is important to understand how the world functions after their decline in 2017 and how specifically the United States of America and the world dealt, and continues to deal, with ISIS. Within understanding the world post the rise of ISIS, I would say that the most crucial part is understanding how they harnessed the media in a way that had never been done before and how they became the cornerstone of modern terrorism so that their ideology continues to this day. 

ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, is a Salafi-jihadist group that is based primarily in Northern and Eastern Syria and Northern Iraq. There are approximately 8000-16000 members. 

They started out under the name "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" (AQI) and were a direct result of the United States Invasion of Iraq. This was due to the ill-advised invasion by George W. Bush on the grounds that there were viable weapons of mass destruction, even though the the United Nations Weapons Inspection found virtually nothing. Saddam Hussein was toppled in this invasion, but the system was very fragile and it was the only system Iraq knew, so a power vacuum was created and America had no plan on how to control or help the political system. Saddam Hussein was also two steps ahead of the Americans and preyed upon their weaknesses: vulnerability to terrorism and suicide attacks. 

Overtime, AQI went on to split fully from Al-Qaeda, as they became more violent and split farther away from Al-Qaeda's mission. They became the Islamist State of Iraq (ISI) in 2006, one step before fully becoming ISIS in 2013, and rose further to prominence. They harnessed the media in a way never seen before by posting videos of their gruesome acts and using it to further their ideology in a way that was unprecedented. Due to how technology connects the world, they were able to spread their ideology throughout the world and still to this day inspire many terrorist groups and individuals to act in their name. Their ideology will never fully die because it is so deeply entrenched in the media.