It’s also a declaration of war against al-Qaida. By declaring a caliphate, the Islamic State is targeting al-Qaida’s funding sources and hoping to win over fighters from al-Qaida’s far-flung franchises in places such as Somalia and Yemen, said Patrick Johnston, who studies Iraqi insurgent groups for the RAND Corp., the California-based research institute.
Have people claimed to be caliph before?
Over the centuries, different people have claimed the title, from members of the Umayya clan, who made the caliphate that stretched from Spain to Afghanistan into a hereditary dynasty in the 7th and 8th centuries, to the Mamluk kings who ruled Egypt in the Middle Ages. “Sometimes there were two or more separate caliphates at the same time with spheres of influence,” said Deina Abdelkader, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. “Iran was once a base for a caliphate, and then you would have another caliphate in southern Spain. So they co-existed.”
With the coming of the Ottoman Empire, the definition of the word caliphate shifted. “Basically the sultan was the political power who ruled the Ottoman Empire, but then they added the title caliph so he was also the religious leader of the Ottoman Empire,” Abdelkader said. That lasted until a group of military officers seized power in what became Turkey and canceled the title in 1924. Baghdadi isn’t the first radical Muslim to take on the title of caliph in contemporary times. Afghanistan Taliban leader Mullah Omar declared himself caliph in the 1990s.
Does the Islamic State want to re-create the Ottoman Empire?
In his Ramadan remarks on Tuesday, Baghdadi referred to the defeat of Muslims after the “fall of their caliphate,” apparently a reference to the end of the Ottoman Empire 90 years ago. After the breakup of the empire, Western colonial powers Britain and France created new nation states in former Ottoman territories, divvying them up as part of the Sykes-Picot treaty at the end of World War I. Baghdadi repudiates those borders as illegitimate. “Syria is not for Syrians, Iraq is not for Iraqis. … The State is a state for all Muslims,” he said.