Pack a lunch. . .

. . . and spend some time with this long piece in the Atlantic about ISIS (h/t Gino). Much of what writer Graeme Wood reports here comports with The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright's landmark 2006 work that details the history of al-Qaida and the underpinnings of jihad. There's way too much to discuss in a single blog post, but two paragraphs from Wood's piece are a good entry point:

Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. [Abu Bakr al-]Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.

The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.

More, a whole lot more, at the link.