Who Is ISIS?

Daesh has been in the news for years now. What started as an offshoot of Al Qaeda has become the global face of evil, and not without reason. Their brutal methods and their magnetism for extremists all over the world has set them apart from other terrorist groups, which now pale in comparison.

A few reports have been made from inside ISIS territory.  There have been a few good analyses too, such as the already iconic What ISIS really wants, written by Graeme Wood for The Atlantic in 2015. Those are all helpful but, for many of us in the West, the nature of the beast is still very hard to comprehend. Who's ISIS?

And then you realize ISIS fighters are, actually, people. Human beings. Maybe, if they had been born in different circumstances, they would be your friends, neighbors or colleagues. Once the black masks come off, the realization is utterly shocking.

This haunting investigative story by Quentin Sommerville and Riam Dalati for BBC is not only a window into the lives of people who happen to be on the wrong side of history, it's also a window into the soul of the journalists in conflict zones, whose work is almost as hard to understand as the bloody context they're in.

The compelling, almost novelesque storytelling is the strongest point of this all-round article. We follow Sommerville's steps, from the river bank where three Daesh fighters lay dead, through the rooms of a creepy abandoned Iraqi farm, and into a Mosul mosque. Starting from the photos from a memory card, he uncovers the lives of the people behind the mask, as innocent children radicalize to become terrorists.

This is the best story I've read in the last couple of months. The images and the web design all come together to bring to life one of the most interesting questions of our time:

Who is ISIS?