The Islamic State

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, Islamic State (IS) and by its Arabic language acronym Daesh is a Salafi jihadist terrorist organisation and former unrecognised proto-state that follows a fundamentalist, Wahhabi, and heterodox doctrine of Sunni Islam. ISIL gained global prominence in early 2014 when it drove Iraqi government forces out of key cities in its Western Iraq offensive, followed by its capture of Mosul and the Sinjar massacre.

This group has been designated a terrorist organisation by the United Nations and many individual countries. ISIL is widely known for its videos of beheadings and other types of executions of both soldiers and civilians, including journalists and aid workers, and its destruction of cultural heritage sites. The United Nations holds ISIL responsible for human rights abuses and war crimes and Amnesty International has charged the group with ethnic cleansing on a "historic scale" in northern Iraq.