For nearly three years, a group of disheveled, violent Islamic fighters that seemingly appeared out of nowhere carved out a proto-state in the Middle East. At its height, the Islamic State controlled a stretch of land that was the size of Great Britain and had a population estimated at 12 million people, reports The New York Times. By far, the largest city under the group’s rule was the Iraqi city of Mosul, though at times variants of ISIS have also controlled a 100-mile coastline in Libya as well as a city in the Philippines. Nearly all that territory has been lost now, the Times notes, but the group has left behind a vast collection of documents that could help answer the troubling question of how the terrorist group held onto so much territory for such a long time. Over the course of five trips the Times’ intrepid reporter, Rukmini Callimachi, gathered more than 15,000 pages of internal Islamic State documents. She literally just walked into old offices, police stations, courts, training camps and homes and took them. A team of journalists then spent 15 months translating and analyzing each document, page by page.
Callimachi writes that, taken together, the collection shows the goal of the terrorists: to establish their own theocracy, run according to a extremely strict interpretation of Islam. To do so, ISIS wielded its power through brutality and bureaucracy. They built a state with relative administrative efficiency, Callimachi says, one that collected taxes, picked up garbage, oversaw a marriage office, issued birth certificates on Islamic State stationary, and ran its own D.M.V. Callimachi reports that, in some cases, ISIS even offered better, more competent government services than the non-terrorist governments that they had replaced.
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