Days after launching a campaign to direct threats to the U.S. in the event it intervenes in Iraq against the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS), jihadists on Twitter have intensified their efforts, suggesting targets and inciting Muslims to act.

In my first post on the quarrel between al-Qaeda and ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham), I laid out the depth of the problem facing al-Qaeda. In this post, I’ll take a brief look back at the origins and root causes of the disagreement between the two groups as well as the appeals that are being made by ISIS and al-Qaeda in their attempts to convince other jihadist groups to support them. 

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham [ISIS], along with its ongoing offensive on Iraqi cities, continues to intensify its use of mobile electronic devices and social media as important weapons of war. Tweets of beheading videos and posts of gruesome images led to Twitter’s suspension of two important ISIS pages, al-I'tisam and al-Hayat, three days after ISIS’s conquest of Mosul. Twitter's action, while symbolizing a step in the right direction, is too little too late.

Recent advances in Iraq by the al-Qaeda clone known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) have raised fears that the entire country could fall to extremists.  Although the collapse of security throughout much of Iraq seems sudden, it did not spring from a void, but rather is the result of a return of sectarianism to Iraq and of the steady growth of ISIS over the past two and a half years. 

The recent expansion of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham (ISIS) into Mosul, Tikrit, Tal Afar, and other areas of Iraq has been accompanied by reports of gruesome violence and serves as a stark reminder of the ongoing relevance of terrorism as a tactic. But it also raises a conceptual question: Is ISIS best described as a terrorist group?