Letter from the Executive Board Greetings delegates, It would be our absolute pleasure to serve on the Executive Board of FIA Nashik MUN in its 2017 edition. Having heard of the Model UN conference and the kind quality platform it has offered students to engage in fruitful discussion and hone some skills beyond the usual curriculum in the past; we are looking forward to some brilliant debate. The two agendas, chosen have been in constant global media limelight but the issues themselves have extremely deep rooted causes which one must research and analyse effectively to understand. This is what makes them tough to tackle and should pose an interesting challenge to the delegates. If you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact either one of us. We would be more than happy to reach out and help. All the best and happy researching! Ayush R and Aditya Agarwal Co-Presidents of the Security council INTRODUCTION TO ISIS or ISIL Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Arabic al-Dawlah al-Islāmiyyah fī al-ʿIrāq wa al- Shām, Arabic abbreviation Dāʿash or Daesh, also called Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) and, since June 2014, the Islamic State, transnational Sunni insurgent group operating primarily in western Iraq and eastern Syria. First appearing under the name ISIL in April 2013, the group launched an offensive in early 2014 that drove Iraqi government forces out of key western cities, while in Syria it fought both government forces and rebel factions in the Syrian Civil War. In June 2014, after making significant territorial gains in Iraq, the group proclaimed the establishment of a caliphate led by the leader of ISIL, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This very group has been one of the greatest security threats that the globe has faced since the World War 2 and the creation of the United Nations. They have successfully captured and controlled large swathes of land in the middle-east, across borders and employs a varied mix of insurgent and guerrilla tactics to maintain control of the same by targeting key defence and civilian establishments. The Islamic State has been a difficult foe to tackle, primarily because they have evolved from being just an insurgent group, to an organisation that administers and controls large swathes of land while creating their own economy of finances and enforcing their own rules of law which they claim is the law of the one true god. This expansion can be drawn parallels to what the Taliban did in Afghanistan but the Islamic State (IS) has become a more efficient and ruthless in terms of how it manages its territory and attempts to continually expand and remain in the limelight by carrying out operations overseas. They have successfully conducted stray attacks by means of recruiting followers and using them to strike fear in the minds of the local populace. Such attacks have been witnessed across America, Europe, Asia and Australia. What sets the IS apart from the Taliban is their online presence and the ability to draw in a large amount of foreign fighters from across the globe. Their online machinery has given them an extremely broad reach and access to recruits across the globe and the means to radicalise normal civilians to become their foot-soldiers and propagate their method of justice. The Islamic State has also had an extremely strong war chest from the very beginning. They tactically seized oil fields in Iraq and Syria, thereby giving them a revenue model to sustain their operations on ground as well as attacks overseas. Apart from selling oil in the black market, the Islamic State also has several modes to collect donations from their sufficiently wealthy benefactors and their ideological supporters. In addition to this, extortion, kidnappings, smuggling and human trafficking have provided the constant flow of funds for the organisation to engage in. [email protected] Territorial control In Iraq and Syria, ISIL/ISIS uses many of the existing Governorate boundaries to subdivide its claimed territory; it calls these divisions Wilayah. After a series of expansions in 2014, it claimed provinces and controlled territory across Iraq, Syria, Sinai, and eastern Libya. The Islamic State also has members in Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Turkey and Somalia but it does not actually control territory in these areas and merely uses their operatives to conduct attacks and incorporate fear in the minds of the civilians. All a part of the propaganda machine that they have successfully created to draw out more followers and stay in the limelight across the world’s media. Their de-facto caliphate, headquartered at Raqqa has in the recent times seen a considerable decrease in territorial control. In its peak, the caliphate had over 100,000 square kilometres of territory under its jurisdiction in the middle-east alone. This has today shrunk to almost half of that size with just a little over 50,000 sq. km under its jurisdiction. Most of the progress against the Islamic State can be attributed to military operations by the various factions involved in the region. The Combined Joint action task force (CJTF) as a part of their operation, Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) conducts regular airstrikes targeting Islamic State positions. The same can be said of the Russians who have been providing the air cover for the Syrian Arab Army on Syrian soil. The United States of America too, employs a similar strategy where they provide air-cover for the Kurdish Peshmerga in their operations against the IS. In addition, both respective militaries have provided logistical assistance in terms of supplying arms and ammunitions for their proxy ground forces. The United States of America also continues to provide arms and ammunition for the Free Syrian Army, who they consider the “legitimate” representative of the people in Syria. There is however, international contention and opposition to this stance of the United States. Apart from a continuous loss of control over territory in the Middle-East, the ISIS has also lost out territorial control in Egypt and Libya almost completely. At present they control negligible amounts of territory in both these countries. There is also a massive reduction of controlled territory in Nigeria, where Boko Haram, an extremist organisation with allegiance to the ISIS and its Caliph has seen its influence and territorial control shrink considerably. Their enforcement of rigorous laws coupled with their infamous practice of kidnapping school girls and selling them in the flesh market. Human rights abuse The United Nations' chief investigator stated that "Fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL) may be added to a list of war crimes suspects in Syria." By June 2014, according to United Nations reports, ISIS had killed hundreds of prisoners of war and over 1,000 civilians. In August 2014, the UN accused ISIS of committing "mass atrocities" and war crimes, including the mass killing of up to 250 Syrian Army soldiers near Tabqa Air base. Other known killing of military prisoners in the early stages of the caliphate took place at Camp Speicher (1,095–1,700 Iraqi soldiers shot and "thousands" more "missing") and the Shaer gas field (200 Syrian soldiers shot). In early September 2014, the United Nations Human Rights Council agreed to send a team to Iraq and Syria to investigate the abuses and killings being carried out by the ISIS on "an unimaginable scale". Prince Zeid bin Ra'ad, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, urged world leaders to step in to protect women and children suffering at the hands of ISIS militants, who he said were trying to create a "house of blood". Over the next 2-2.5 years, the Islamic State would carry on in its barbaric acts with absolute disregard for human rights and human life. In June 2016, a United Nations mandated Human Rights Inquiry, “The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria” would go on to release a report on the violations committed against the Yazidis in Syria and as a conclusion to the report would go on to recognize that the ISIS was committing a genocide against the Yazidis. Religious and minority groups ISIS compels people in the areas that it controls to declare Islamic creed and live according to its interpretation of Sunni Islam and Sharia law. There have been many reports of the group's use of death threats, torture and mutilation to compel conversion to Islam, and of clerics being killed for refusal to pledge allegiance to the so-called "Islamic State". ISIS directs violence against Shia Muslims, indigenous Assyrian, Chaldean, Syriac and Armenian Christians, Yazidis, Druze, Shabaks and Mandeans in particular. Amnesty International has held ISIL responsible for the ethnic cleansing of ethnic and religious minority groups in northern Iraq on a "historic scale". In a special report released on 2 September 2014, it describes how ISIS has "systematically targeted non-Arab and non-Sunni Muslim communities, killing or abducting hundreds, possibly thousands, and forcing more than 830,000 others to flee the areas it has captured since 10 June 2014". Among these people are Assyrian Christians, Turkmen Shia, Shabak Shia, Yazidis, Kaka'i and Sabean Mandeans, who have lived together for centuries in Nineveh province, large parts of which were overrun by IS forces. Time and again the Islamic State has considered all “non-believers” who do not subscribe to their ideologies as infidels who need to be wiped out from the face of the earth. Apart from forcing conversions at gun-point or killing those who refuse to do so, the Islamic State has continuously implemented the strategy of separating the children of other faiths and beliefs from any surviving relatives and placing them in the care of IS foot soldiers who are tasked with the indoctrination into ISIS beliefs and principles.