The Demonic Wellspring

Unlike al Qaeda, which offers victory in some remote era, ISIS, in occupying territory and declaring the caliphate, invites its followers to live in the prophesied paradise now.

By James Traub, WSJ
Updated March 14, 2015 12:09 a.m. ET

ISIS is scaring the daylights out of us. Al Qaeda announced itself to the world with an unspeakable bang but over time retreated (and regrouped) in the face of drone attacks and heightened surveillance and law-enforcement efforts. Islamic State, as it now wishes to be called, seems only to proliferate, like a lethal virus that has escaped from the lab and begun madly self-replicating. Already established across a chunk of Iraq and Syria equal in size to Great Britain, it has begun to colonize Libya, almost a thousand miles away, and perhaps also the Sinai, Afghanistan and Yemen. Kurdish soldiers and American pilots are killing hundreds or thousands of ISIS warriors, but still more thousands stream across the Turkish border to die a glorious death. ISIS seems to be nourished from a demonic wellspring.

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