ISIS: Ten Years on from the Summer of Terror

A decade ago, ISIS was the leading story for every news organization in the Western world, especially after its attack on the seafront at Nice on July 14, 2016. Having emerged in Iraq, two years earlier ISIS had declared a global caliphate. Through the clever deployment of digital media that claim attracted followers from around the world. But ISIS accompanied its headline attacks in Europe with the murder of much larger numbers of ordinary Muslims, declared infidels for disagreeing with ISIS’s fringe interpretation of Islam. In this episode, we investigate that interpretation. And by looking at the beliefs of the people drawn to its radical message, we see how ISIS’s teachings took shape and gained traction among isolated individuals far and wide.  Nile Green talks to Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State (Random House, 2017), a Foreign Affairs “Best Book of the Year” and won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction.