Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears and bid welcome to the first post of The Green Hair Affair! I’m Emily Wilkinson, coming at you with analysis of current events, political drama, and social issues across America and the world. And at the present moment, what could be a bigger issue than the rise of a powerful, terrorist threat in Iraq?

If I were to ask students around South about The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), I could most likely count on hearing few answers other than:

A) “They’re terrorists,”

and/or

B) “They’re evil.”

And while both are correct answers in their own right, they do not even begin to express the vastness and sophistication that sets ISIS (also known as ISIL for The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) apart from Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups in the region.

First off, it’s important to note that ISIS’s presence is not new in the the area. The conflict between ISIS and its neighbors is long-winded and extremely complicated, but I’ll give you the quick rundown.

The organization has been alive and kicking since 2004, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi established what was then called Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The mostly Sunni terrorist group actively sought out conflict with Shia Muslims in Iraq. When AQI’s leader was killed by US airstrikes in 2006, the organization was renamed months later to the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI). The reins were eventually handed over to current leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2010. Amidst the turmoil in Syria in 2013, ISI announced that they would take control over an Al-Qaeda based militant group in Syria and become The Islamic State in Iraq, or what is known today as ISIS. Al-Qaeda was not pleased, and rejected the demand, as well as cut all ties to ISIS the following year. It was, needless to say, a messy divorce.

So who exactly are enemies of ISIS? The most obvious enemy would be the United States, as announced by Obama and by ISIS in videos featuring the gruesome beheadings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, respectively. Other enemies across the globe include pretty much all of Europe, Iran, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Kurds, the Syrian government, the Syrian rebels, and anyone who opposes ISIS’s goal of a nation built on strict Sharia law. So basically the entire globe is not in their favor.

With this much opposition, why is everyone so intimidated by ISIS? They’re winning. ISIS is a master of propaganda, with accounts on Twitter and Instagram, as well as their own website with videos and merchandise. It’s sophistication and brand recognition the likes of which we’ve never seen in Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. ISIS has their own infrastructure built on extortion, human trafficking, and even bank robbery, and makes nearly one million dollars a day in black market oil. ISIS is running as smoothly as a well-oiled machine, pun absolutely intended.

Our defense against this new superpower is uncertain, bringing old enemies together in awkward alliances against a common threat, including a thorny union between Iran and the US. But then again, when was the last time the fight for good against evil didn’t include an unlikely team of heroes?

The Green Hair Affair is a monthly political blog posting on the 15th of every month, created and written by Emily Wilkinson.

Emily Wilkinson is a junior at Shawnee Mission South and is the social media manager for the Gay Straight Alliance as well as the assistant editor-in-chief and web editor for The Patriot.

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Opinions written in blogs on smsouthnews.com only reflect the opinions of the writer of the post and is not in any way the opinion of The Patriot staff as a whole.