ABSTRACT
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), like many street gangs, is the offspring of sectarian conflict. The collapse of the Iraqi state following the US invasion in 2003 and the ongoing Syrian Civil War provided a space or “black hole,” a region lacking strong governance and social control, fertile for ISIS to prosper and mature. Over the last decade, ISIS’s organisational composition has evolved from a terror group into a bureaucratically led caliphate governing a shell-state. ISIS’s transformation into a provider of extra-legal governance managing a shell-state, has produced a group structure typical of bureaucratic organisations with checks-and-balances that facilitate functionality. ISIS’s active participants are predominantly foreign-born and “in their late teens and early twenties”. Males remain ISIS’s largest demographic, even though the group is not limiting enrollments. ISIS’s territorial control has allowed the group to expand enlistments to males under the age of 16 in urban centers like Raqqa, Syria.
