"The Guardian" has chronicled some of the deepest understandings of Daesh, including the young people that became devoted to a caliphate.

Citizens of the affected countries formed militias to protect from the impending death that would be Daesh. Those groups facilitated response to Bagdadi and pushed him and his band of land thieves out of the land they once called home. Those groups are called enemies by President Assad who was unable to end Daesh by himself. He remains in power because he was able to use the successes of these groups to build on his own barrel bombs. He would come to all these people Daesh when in fact they were only interested in saving their own lives that Assad could not.

21 October 2017
By Jason Burke

Syrian Democratic Forces fighters stand guard in Raqqa on 20 October after retaking the city from Isis militants.

...Yet when we recall Isis at the height of its powers, (click here) the scale of its decline is impressive. By mid-2014 the group controlled a taxable population of some seven or eight million, oilfields and refineries, vast grain stores, lucrative smuggling routes and vast stockpiles of arms and ammunition, as well as entire parks of powerful modern military hardware. Its economic capital was Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Isis was the most powerful, wealthiest, best-equipped jihadi force ever seen.

Its success sent shockwaves throughout the Islamic world. What al-Qaida, founded by Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 1988, had talked about doing decades or centuries in the future, an upstart breakaway faction had done in months. Its blitzkrieg campaign and the refounding of an Islamic caliphate – announced from the pulpit of a 950-year-old mosque in Mosul in a speech by its leader, Ibrahim Awwad, the 46-year-old former Islamic law student better known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – easily eclipsed the 9/11 attacks as Islamist extremists’ most spectacular achievement.

In 2014 and 2015, I interviewed young men, and some women, who had found the call of Isis irresistible. They came from Belgium and the Maldives, both thousands of miles from the Levant. A few returned to their homelands to proselytise or, in Europe, to carry out some of the most infamous terrorist attacks ever. Isis inspired others who had not travelled to execute their own attacks, too. From Bangladesh to Florida, hundreds died in a new wave of terrorist acts. A dozen or so Isis “provinces” were established, from West Africa to eastern Asia....