TDB: What is it like living in Raqqa now? What are the effects of the coalition war on morale and discipline?

AJ: Thanks to God who gave us the opportunity in our lifetime to see the formation of the Islamic State. Raqqa is the capital of the Islamic state and will always be. We have a good Islamic life here. It is true that we have a few air strikes once in a while, but we are Muslims, we knew it would not be easy for us to establish our state. We knew that we would struggle and would have hardships along the way.

If you look to the establishment of any nation in the past, it has had to go through what we are going through. The United States, for example, had a civil war for many years before it takes the shape that has today. France, too, went through a revolution for 30 years. We just declared our Islamic State two years ago and now, as you see, the whole world is against us and yet we are expanding our territory and we are all over the globe.

[In reality, ISIS has lost as much as half the terrain it controlled in July 2014 in Iraq, and about a fifth of that it controlled in Syria at that time. That said, it has established “wilayats” or provinces in the Sinai Peninsula, Libya (where it is also on the backfoot now), Afghanistan, Russia, and beyond. It’s spate of terror attacks in the West and Asia and other countries of the Middle East have been the subject of international headlines all throughout 2015 and 2016.]