Whether it's last year’s brutal attack at the office of Charlie Hebdo, or the Paris attacks in which more than 100 people died, or the more recent Brussels attack, Islamic State (IS) has become a potent threat to global peace in the last three years. Since September 2014, ISIS has taken lives of over 1100 people in different terrorist attacks world over. Even now these attacks are far from over as ISIS remains a potent force and holds key positions in Middle-East despite the NATO as well as Russian forces claiming victory against the IS fighters. Much like Al Qaeda and other terrorist organisations, Islamic State aka ISIS too is an offspring born of nefarious imperialist intentions of the West and the Islamic world’s perpetual fear of Islam being in danger. Daesh, as it is called in Arabic, is a phenomenon which propagates the idea of Islamic rule or the Caliphate over the world - where power would flow from the sanctum-sanctorum of Mecca itself.

Whether it was the USSR’s misadventure in Afghanistan in the 1980s which gave birth to CIA’s once-upon-a-time blue-eyed boy - Al Qaeda, or America’s attempt to annihilate Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussain in Iraq post September 11 - every time a Western country ventured into the Islamic World, it cemented the age-old notion of ‘Islam in Danger’ and provided the very idea of ISIS with the legitimacy it was eagerly waiting for.

Currently, this Frankenstein’s monster has become the face of global terrorism and no matter how hard the West tries to disown it, it always comes back to haunt and torment.

‘The rise of the Islamic Caliphate or Islamic State’

In 2001, America was attacked by Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. It was an attack on temples of American capitalism and headquarters of the world’s only superpower’s military might. The then US President, George W Bush took refuge in the Old Testament and came out with theory of ‘Either with us or against us’.

It was the revival of a new dark phase and Islam became the most potent enemy the world had seen.

The neo conservatives who shaped Bush’s policies asked him to go to war. The first casualty was Afghanistan, and the second was Saddam’s Iraq, perhaps the most secular of all Arab states.

The attack on Iraq in 2003 was different from Operation Desert Storm of the 1991 Gulf War. Saddam was ousted, hanged and Sunni-ruled Iraq was replaced by Shia Iraq.

The Islamic world was shaken. Saddam was lauded as a hero by the Sunni Islamic world against the Americans, and its trusted partner Israel.

Before the rise of the IS, the West in general was hypnotised with political scientist Samuel P Huntington’s notion of the clash of civilisations - a prescription of war between Islam and the West.

The unsolved question of Palestine was unfathomable for the Islamic world, which produced generations of muslim jihadists who believed Islam was in danger.

In short, terrorist outfits like Hezbollah, Hamas, and later Al-Qaeda, came into being.

But only Hamas stood against the might of Israel and grabbed the eyeballs of the Islamic World. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group, tried to take on Israel but failed to acquire the status of Islam’s savior from the wrath of the Zionists.

Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, who happened to be the godfather of IS patron Abu Bakhr Al Bagdadi, the self proclaimed Caliph and heir of the last prophet, was the one who first formed Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later became the Islamic State.

Unlike Laden who never wanted a sectarian divide among Muslims, Zarqawi wanted a Sunni Caliphate in which even Shias wouldn’t be allowed to practice their faith. But his ambitions didn’t materialise due to heavy American presence in the country. Before he died in an ambush in 2006, he laid the foundation of the self-proclaimed Sunni caliphate which we today know as ISIS.