Libya is the only other country where ISIS holds territory -- the coastal town of Sirte and other patches along the Mediterranean. ISIS has invested heavily in Libya, with senior aides of Baghdadi dispatched to supervise its operations there and several hundred fighters deployed there from Syria. Libya's lack of central government and functioning army, its vast desert spaces and competing militia, make it ideal territory for ISIS. Libyan territory can also be (and has been) the platform for launching terror attacks in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.
But ISIS' ambitions run much further -- it has established a presence in Yemen, Afghanistan and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. Graeme Wood identifies three concentric rings: "the Interior Ring in the Levant, the Near Abroad in the wider Middle East and North Africa, and the Far Abroad in Europe, Asia, and the United States."
Smashing borders
ISIS does not recognize the borders of nation states that make up the modern world nor the idea of a democratic state or citizenship. It sees these as man-made creations at odds with the notion of a caliphate. So it frequently celebrates its ability to defy the "Sykes-Picot line," the colonial-era border that divides Iraq and Syria.
It even produced a video entitled "The End of Sykes-Picot" in which a voice-over declared: "This is not the first border we will break. Inshallah, we break other borders also, but we start with this one."
READ MORE: 'Help us find a life:' The terrifying reality of living under ISIS in Raqqa, Syria
ISIS has created provinces -- wilayat -- that bear no resemblance to existing states. Baghdadi himself has put the destruction of borders front and center of ISIS' goals. "The Islamic State does not recognize synthetic borders, nor any citizenship besides Islam," he declared in 2012.