Franchise wars

You can't tell the players without a program and it's no wonder that people feel confused by the plethora of names the terrorist groups use. To make matters worse, they keep splitting and sometimes they change their names just for the hell of it. So here's a guide you can stick on your wall.

In the beginning there was al-Qaeda, starting in about 1989. There were lots of other terrorist start-ups in the Arab world around the same time, but eventually almost all of them either died out or joined one of the big franchises. Al-Qaeda is the one to watch, since the success of its 2001 attacks on the United States put it head and shoulders above all its rivals.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and foreign jihadists flocked into the Sunni Arab parts of the country to help the resistance, their leader, a Jordanian called Abu Musaib al Zarqawi, sought to affiliate his organization with al-Qaeda to boost its appeal. In 2004, Osama bin Laden agreed to allow them to use the name al-Qaeda in Iraq, although there was little coordination between the two organizations.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq formally changed its name to Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) in 2006, but it didn't really begin to flourish until a new leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, took over in 2010. Soon afterwards, the Syrian civil war broke out and Baghdadi sent a Syrian member of ISI, Abu Muhammad al Golani, into Syria to organize a branch there. It was called the al-Nusra Front.

The al-Nusra Front grew very fast - so fast that by 2013 Baghdadi decided to reunite the two branches of the organization under the new name, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). But this meant that Golani was being demoted to manager of the Syrian branch, so he declared his independence and asked...