ISIS: The State of Terror

Jessica Stern · J. M. Berger

Mar 2015 · HarperCollins

About this ebook

The Islamic State, known as ISIS, exploded into the public eye in 2014 with startling speed and shocking brutality. It has captured the imagination of the global jihadist movement, attracting recruits in unprecedented numbers and wreaking bloody destruction with a sadistic glee that has alienated even the hardcore terrorists of its parent organization, al Qaeda.

Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, two of America’s leading experts on terrorism, dissect the new model for violent extremism that ISIS has leveraged into an empire of death in Iraq and Syria, and an international network that is rapidly expanding in the Middle East, North Africa and around the world.

ISIS: The State of Terror traces the ideological innovations that the group deploys to recruit unprecedented numbers of Westerners, the composition of its infamous snuff videos, and the technological tools it exploits on social media to broadcast its atrocities, and its recruiting pitch to the world, including its success at attracting thousands of Western adherents. The authors examine ISIS’s predatory abuse of women and children and its use of horror to manipulate world leaders and its own adherents as it builds its twisted society. The authors offer a much-needed perspective on how world leaders should prioritize and respond to ISIS’s deliberate and insidious provocations. 

Ratings and reviews

I was looking for a book that wasn't written by any Christian fundamentalist, who would just have a very narrow viewpoint on the recent events in the Middle East! This book was well-written, academically researched, appropriately foot-noted for sources, and overall covering every aspect of ISIS, its beginnings, rise, growth, use of media, philosophy, etc., through a factual, non-christian lens. Totally recommend it if you don't want a non-religious, but an academic view point of ISIS.

Isis is smash islam

New terror

About the author

J. M. Berger is a nonresident fellow with the Brookings Institution and the author of Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, a critically acclaimed history of the American jihadist movement. He is a regular contributor to Foreign Policy magazine and his website, Intelwire.com, has published thousands of declassified documents on the September 11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing.