The Map and the Territory: ISIS’s Hedgehog Leadership
How one views the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) (and I’m referring to the original group and not to the off-brand in Afghanistan or the off-off-brand across Africa) and its leader, Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, depends very much on one’s politics and ethics. To many—likely most of us—they’re brutal slavers and a cultish, malignant raider gang, like something torn straight from a Mad Max nightmare. Some argue that Iraq is an example of how Western intervention and failing state services create the very environment of raw, divisive resentment that benefits black-clad violent ideologues like ISIS. Still, others—some rigid Salafi-jihadist types for instance—could try and argue that a vicious and threatening world requires a vicious form of ‘resistance’, even if that means brutally exterminating rivals. Whatever the take, the fact is that al-Baghdadi failed in his endeavors. And he failed because he was too much of a hedgehog. This essay focuses on the original ISIS—centered in Iraq and Syria under al-Baghdadi—and argues that the organization’s meteoric rise and catastrophic collapse can best be understood through Isaiah Berlin’s famous metaphor: the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Al-Baghdadi was a hedgehog—singular in focus, uncompromising in ideology, and ultimately inflexible in strategy.
ISIS’s origins lie in the geopolitical chaos of the early 2000s. The 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq dismantled Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime and disbanded the Iraqi military, creating a power vacuum and a deep pool of disenfranchised Sunni Arabs. Many of these individuals became the base for insurgent movements, including AQI, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. After Zarqawi’s death in 2006, the decline of AQI due to U.S. counterinsurgency efforts and the Sunni Awakening, the group rebranded itself as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and later expanded into Syria, exploiting the chaos of the civil war.
Al-Baghdadi was a hedgehog—singular in focus, uncompromising in ideology, and ultimately inflexible in strategy.
The Caliphate That Wasn’t
After years of insurgency, ISIS formally declared itself as a caliphate in 2014. Al-Baghdadi’s leadership, since 2010, was instrumental in ISIS’s early successes, particularly during its rapid expansion across Iraq and Syria. He soon upped the game and began forging the region—all languages, religions, and cultures—into a single LARP-ing “the-7th-century-but-with-Kalashnikovs” society in a strict and unforgiving totalitarian supertribe. In its thankfully short existence in the region, ISIS was an imperialist, genocidal, and largely homogenizing force that tried to obliterate the identity of every group it conquered.
It’s important to note that “Abu Bakr” al-Baghdadi, born Ibrahim al-Badri, didn’t choose the rubric of the 1st Caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate out of delusion or mere classical fetishism. He was working within an ideological framework, and he had clear goals. He picked the name because he thought it would work. He believed in ISIS. He believed he had crafted a template for a society equal to the challenges of the post-jihad world—a society that could and would survive.
Map of ISIS’s territorial control in Syria and Iraq in 2015. ISIS control is highlighted by gray coloring. Source.
But, observation demonstrates that he often did wildly impractical things. One of the most impractical things al-Baghdadi ever did was the very declaration of a caliphate. While it was a powerful propaganda move that attracted foreign fighters and temporarily legitimized ISIS in the eyes of jihadist supporters, it was also strategically flawed.
By declaring a caliphate, ISIS committed itself to governing territory rather than remaining a fluid insurgency. This made it a clear and stationary target for state and substate polities, including the U.S., Iran, the Kurds, and Russia. Unlike groups that operate in shadows, ISIS now had to defend fixed positions, provide services, and maintain control over a hostile population. This overextension ultimately led to its downfall, as it provoked overwhelming military responses that eroded its territory and resources.
Al-Baghdadi’s decision to take on the entire world while trying to function as a state was both ambitious and deeply impractical. Al-Baghdadi never considered that his plan may have been flawed, that outside factors doomed his army, or that perhaps his goal of uniting and governing the region and militarily annihilating his enemies was not the same objective. He had a very romanticized view of war—a view colored by his preferences and presuppositions more than by objective assessment. Part of this is that al-Baghdadi saw retreat not as a tactical maneuver but as a moral failing.
In a 2016 audio message, he urged his fighters: “Do not retreat… Holding your ground with honor is a thousand times easier than retreating in shame.” Under his leadership, ISIS emphasized the doctrine of steadfastness (sabr) and martyrdom in battle, promoting the idea that fighters should hold their ground at all costs. This view was rooted in a rigid, absolutist interpretation of jihad, where dying in combat was glorified, and retreat was often equated with cowardice or betrayal of the cause.
His leadership style was marked by ideological rigidity and an unwillingness to adapt. His commanders often found themselves in hard situations, where the expectation was to succeed through sheer willpower rather than strategic flexibility. Infighting was common, as the leadership was quick to execute those who showed divergent thinking, in cycles of purges that weakened ISIS’s ability to operate effectively.
Policy-wise, ISIS enforced extreme measures to maintain control. Governance was dictated through fear, with public executions and brutal punishments ensuring compliance. While ISIS attempted to provide basic state functions such as taxation, policing, and social services, these were secondary to its primary focus on expansion and ideological purity. This approach meant that while ISIS could control territory and sell some fake, off-the-rack 7th-century Arabia nostalgia, it struggled to build the institutions necessary for long-term governance.
Foxes and Hedgehogs
Long before 7th-century Arabia, a fragment of Greek poetry declared, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In the 1950s, political theorist Isaiah Berlin expanded on this idea, using the fox and the hedgehog as archetypes for how people approach politics and philosophy. Seeing the world through the lens of a single grand idea—ideology—is the hallmark of a hedgehog.
Ideology is a map of the world. It provides context, shows the relationships between things, and helps us navigate political and philosophical terrain. But like any map, ideology shapes what we pay attention to—it simplifies, distorts, and omits more than it reveals. Clinging to a single ideology is like seeing only one map. A road atlas is useful if you stay on the highways, but if you venture off-road, you’d be better off with a whole set of maps, each for where you are headed. Instead of forcing the world to fit your map, let the terrain determine which map you use.
Foxes are agile and adaptive; they switch maps as needed. Hedgehogs, by contrast, cling to one grand idea. Al-Baghdadi, the hedgehog, had only one map—he knew one big thing and stuck to it.
In contrast, a fox’s war is messy, adaptive, and uncomfortable. A fox doesn’t need history to rhyme—it just needs it to make sense for long enough to get to the next move. It builds coalitions across contradictions, co-opts rivals instead of eliminating them, and never mistakes purity for strength. It’s closer to what the Kurds did in Rojava—flexible governance, localism, tactical alliances with the U.S. one day and Assad the next. Or what Iran’s Quds Force orchestrated: networks of client militias, ideological only when convenient, brutal but deeply contextual. These weren’t moral actors—but they were foxes. And they’re still standing.
Al-Baghdadi, meanwhile, tried to play the game with only one rule: ‘Caliphate, or bust.’ No bargaining, no hedging, no slow-building soft power. Just shock, awe, and black flags—until it all collapsed under the weight of its own certainty.
To mix these metaphors further, foxes build webs; hedgehogs build walls. One flexes. One fractures. And history tends to favor the fox—not because it’s cleverer, but because it listens. Because it waits. Because it knows that no map, no matter how sacred, is ever the terrain.
Skipping Steps
What looked like governance was a kind of theater—power cosplayed in the costume of a medieval caliphate.
ISIS, at first glance, appears to be a fusion of cultures (i.e., Arab and non-Arab, local recruits and foreign fighters), perspectives, and experiences—hammer-forged into a single mold with a single worldview. But it isn’t a fusion. It’s a top-down imposition of a single vision. Its constituent cultures aren’t absorbed but brutally destroyed. The men are either conscripted into ISIS’s army and subjected to its discipline at all times or killed. The women are enslaved, and any surviving children are raised within ISIS.
For all his fixation on early Islamic history, al-Baghdadi jumps straight to the Caliphate, skipping over the long process of building institutions that made the early Caliphates durable. He is less like the Rightly Guided Caliphs and more like a warlord leading his army on a perpetual campaign of conquest. He was less Omar and more Alexander. Like Alexander, there was always a high probability that his empire would die with him because it had little else holding it together.
To be sure, ISIS understood the aesthetics of statecraft better than many actual states. They printed their own currency, ran courts, distributed leaflets, even renamed streets. They posted glossy photos of traffic cops and garbage collectors like a dystopian Instagram state. But these were symbols masquerading as substance. Real governance means bureaucracies that can last beyond the charismatic leader and institutions that can accommodate dissent or failure. Al-Baghdadi’s regime had none of that. It had rituals, not rules. What looked like governance was a kind of theater—power cosplayed in the costume of a medieval caliphate. The hedgehog doesn’t know the difference between a symbol and a system. So, ISIS poured its energy into optics instead of infrastructure, domination instead of durability.
Comparisons to Other Historical Movements
ISIS’s trajectory mirrors other radical movements that attempted to impose totalitarian rule through extreme violence. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia similarly sought to create a utopian society by eradicating existing cultural and political structures, leading to mass killings and societal collapse. Nazi Germany, too, pursued ideological purity at the expense of military pragmatism, with Hitler’s refusal to retreat or adjust strategy leading to devastating losses. Like these movements, ISIS was ultimately unsustainable because it lacked the ability to govern in a stable manner, relying instead on perpetual conflict to maintain its existence.
The hedgehog doesn’t know the difference between a symbol and a system.
In the end, al-Baghdadi was killed in a U.S. raid in Syria, and while ISIS affiliates persist in other regions, the core caliphate project lies in ruins. The organization’s legacy is a cautionary tale about the dangers of ideological extremism and the limits of brute force as a political strategy. ISIS pushed its enemies out entirely, occupying all major locations, enslaving much of the population, and ruling over the rest under its black banner. But to simply rule over a conquered population isn’t the same as governing or building a stable state. To create these kinds of sociopolitical hybrids, the constituent parts need to have several points of compatibility. It’s less about manufactured fusion and more about cultural diffusion in a broader sense—an organic, unsystematic blending of ideas, customs, and practices through everyday exchange and interaction.
It may seem like an academic distinction, but the key is that ISIS is structured in a way that makes such an exchange impossible. The whole thing is built on crushing regional cultures and assimilating people into this massive, rigid totalitarian system. There can be no synthesis and thus no state with ISIS because ISIS cannot survive with regional differences and an interplay of ideas. Totalitarianism dominates everything outside the state but skips the process of actually building that state.
