ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Reuters/Stringer Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East. The Islamic State has become part and parcel of global news cycles, but its goals remain little discussed. Instead, Westerners focus on determining whether or not IS should be understood as representing Islam or rather as an aberration of the faith. Ever since the terror group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, conquered the city of Mosul and wide swathes of territory straddling both Syria and Iraq in the summer of last year , the West and its mainstream media have been near-obsessed with this clear and imminent danger to various countries and populations in the Middle East - all the way from Turkey down to Saudi Arabia. In spite of this really rather localized threat, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (aka Caliph Ibrahim) now even seems able to exert a certain influence on the 2016 US presidential elections, arguably as a r