In June 2014 the Sunni fundamentalist terrorist organisation the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) expanded rapidly across parts of central and northern Iraq. They captured significant cities such as Mosul and Tikrit, adding them to their existing strongholds in a number of restive Sunni-majority towns and cities in Iraq (including Ramadi and Fallujah, which they had held since January 2014) and in Syria (such as Raqqa, which they controlled from March 2013). Their stated goal was to create a new Islamic caliphate across the Arab world by smashing the borders imposed on the Middle East nearly a century ago by the British and French following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. In a matter of days, ISIS had in fact bulldozed key parts of the border between Iraq and Syria and declared their new ‘Islamic State’. Having seized such large swathes of territory, they began to impose their strict fundamentalist vision: they set up makeshift sharia law courts in which ‘infidels’ (non-Muslims, those who refused to publicly endorse their ideology and even those accused of petty crimes like drinking alcohol) were tried and, in many cases, executed; women were forced into marriages and then raped; Christians were publicly crucified and left to die slowly over the course of several days; mass graves were hastily dug and filled with the (mostly Shia) corpses of Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), who had fought against the sudden advance of ISIS. With every victory ISIS increased in strength, money, military equipment and prestige among their fellow militant Sunni jihadists. They also increased in confidence. ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani threatened not only to topple the Maliki government and to settle debts in Samarra and Baghdad (both of which have significant Shia shrines), but also to push further south to destroy Shia Islam's two holiest cities, which he referred to as ‘Karbala al-munajjasah [Karbala the defiled]’ and ‘Najaf al-ashrak [Najaf the most polytheistic]’ (quoted in Aghlani 2014).