By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 27, 2017

The Islamic State’s June 2014 declaration that the areas it controlled were the restored “Caliphate” was seen by many as a novel development. In fact, “the State” was declared in October 2006. The next month, the predecessor of the Islamic State (IS), Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM), dissolved itself, and a month after that the claim to statehood was expanded upon—while being wilfully ambiguous about the caliphal pretensions—in the first speech by the then-emir, Hamid al-Zawi (Abu Umar al-Baghdadi).

Similarly, though confusion remains on the point, it was in this same period that the symbol of the Islamic State, its black flag, was established, in a ninety-page book issued by Al-Furqan Media Foundation a month after Al-Zawi’s speech, in January 2007, ten years ago this month. The document, “Informing the People of the Birth of the Islamic State” (Ilam al-Anam bi Milad Dawlat al-Islam), was unsigned, but was said to have been “prepared under the supervision” of Uthman bin Abd al-Rahman al-Tamimi, an official of the then-Islamic State of Iraq’s (ISI) “Shari’a Committee” (Hay’at al-Shari’a), part of a structure of administrative bodies that has vastly expanded in the decade since.

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