President Pranab Mukherjee has announced that India strongly supports Iraq’s territorial integrity and its government’s efforts to “overcome the current ISIS crisis”. In a message to his counterpart Fuad Masum on the eve of National Day of Iraq, the President said India deeply values its close and friendly relations with Iraq. Iraq is facing a crisis as it is fighting a war against ISIS which controls some central western and western provinces. There have been attempts by the group to target places in the capital Baghdad.
ISIS was originally founded by a protégé of Osama Bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in 1999 as Jamaat al-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad (JTWJ).
The aim of ISIS is to create an Islamic state, referred to as a caliphate, across Sunni areas of Iraq and in Syria.
ISIS’s strategy for revenue includes oil production and smuggling, ransoms from kidnappings, selling stolen artifacts, extortion and controlling crops.
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Who is the current leader of ISIS? Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
