A study of the Emergence and Expansion of Daesh in the Middle East Security Context

Although the emergence of Daesh, as a non-state player, dates back to the last decade, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi formed al-Tawhid wal-Jihad in Iraq, the Iraqi security crisis has shifted the global attentions to this group the most. This paper studies the intellectual, cultural, and other environments for the emergence and expansion of Daesh in the security context of the Middle East in three national, regional, and international levels. The findings of this descriptive-analytical paper show that the concept of Takfir is based on Salafism as its intellectual context. Resistance against waves of globalization is the cultural context for the emergence and expansion of Daesh in the geography of the Islamic World. At the national level, Daesh emerged within the absence of leadership and Sunnis’ identity crisis in desperate countries, exploited the religious feeling of Sunnis, and challenged the sovereignties of desperate countries. At the regional level, Daesh, as a non-state player, counters the Islamic revolution discourse and the axis of resistance, providing an alternative Islamist discourse. At the international level, the clash of civilizations, which was declared by the US, has been transformed to an intra-civilization war for the sake of Islamophobia.