Baathism was one of the great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. It drew its inspiration from the sweeping European movements of fascism and communism of the 1930s, adapting their techniques and pathologies to the political conditions of the Middle East. The original impulses that gave the movement shape in the 1940s were anti-colonial, pan-Arabist and statist. As with their European predecessors in Russia and Italy, the Baathists in Syria and Iraq were small minority parties who used violence to come to power. More ruthless than their many political enemies, in the long run they prevailed, only to fall into infighting and stagnation. By the 1990s both Syria and Iraq were classic Arab police states, where post-revolutionary one-party regimes continued to rule long after the ideological impulses which had driven them were dead.

Political Islam has often been described as filling the void left in the Middle East by the discrediting of other political ideals since the 1980s. However, at least in the case of Islamic State (ISIS), the influence of Baathist thinking can be traced directly from secular nationalists, who would seem odd inspiration for an attempt to return to the medieval caliphate, to the Iraqi successors of its Jordanian founder. Two such bridging figures that brought Baath party organisational methods and thinking to an Islamist revival movement were Samir al-Khlifawi and Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. Both men have since met violent ends, but their conception of a religious police state remains.

Of the pair al-Douri was the more important insurgent but the less influential on Islamic State. He was a political leader of the Iraqi Baath party’s inner circle and Saddam Hussein’s deputy before the invasion in 2003. Following the former’s execution in 2006 he became the new leader of the banned Baath party. However Al-Douri’s real significance is that he had begun the politicisation Iraqi religious traditions back in the 1990s. To build up his powerbase he patronised the Naqshbandi order around Mosul, providing a template which other Iraqi Sunni leaders later followed. Subsequently al-Douri led his insurgent faction into alliance with Islamic State, and the connections he had built from the 1990s were used to ease Mosul’s takeover in 2014. That conquest remains Islamic State’s greatest military success so far and ISIS took full advantage of al-Douri’s men’s military expertise. Typically it then also arrested many of the leading ex-Baathists amongst them after the alliance had won its sweeping victory.