ISIS fighters

ISIS has an intense interest in the apocalypse. Its propaganda references it constantly, and the group has even conquered a town that only really made sense to target in light of prophecy. The idea that ISIS’s actions are literally helping bring on the end times is central to the group’s unique, and disturbing, ideology.

It would be easy to dismiss ISIS’s apocalyptic obsessions as a weird quirk, or a sideshow to the serious business of the brutal war the group is waging in Iraq and Syria. But as a new book from the Brookings Institution’s Will McCants makes clear, understanding ISIS’s fascination with the apocalypse is essential to understanding the group itself.

Apocalyptic fantasies are “a major part of the Islamic State’s recruiting pitch,” McCants, the director of Brookings’s Project on US-Islamic Relations, told me in an April interview.

“Based on their rhetoric, they believe that the final apocalyptic battles with the infidel are swiftly approaching.” Those beliefs aren’t mere superstitions. They have affected huge parts of ISIS’s operations, […]