Logotyp: till Försvarshögskolans hemsida

In four years, ISIS managed to conquer vast areas in both Iraq and Syria and have proven themselves capable of conducting sophisticated military operations. Using terrorism, they have also shocked the world numerous times, most recently in Sri Lanka during the spring of 2019, in an attack leaving more than 250 people dead. Even today there seems to be a discrepancy in how this organization should be defined. Therefore, this thesis examines ISIS through the years of 2010-2015. The ambition is to explain how this organization can be understood through the contrasting theories of hybrid warfare and insurgency from Frank G. Hoffman and David Galula respectively. This thesis concludes that while ISIS’s initial progression bore strong resemblance to the historically typical insurgent, like gaining publicity through terror and using guerilla warfare to acquire supplies and grow, they became something more. They evolved into a hybrid organization capable of mixing conventional combined arms warfare with the deadly effectiveness of irregular methods, essentially converging terrorism with their conventional units. Using modern technology, they managed to turn both social media and commercial products alike, into effective tools of war. This spectacular metamorphosis that is ISIS, illuminates the requirement for development of new theories, or at the very least, to expand on those present today.