An armed Islamic group seizing land and extending its authority across borders is not an unheard of phenomenon.
It is worth considering that there is already an area of land, effectively spanning a national border, governed by an Islamic movement whose members are drawn from multiple nationalities. It is implementing Shari’ah, is dedicated to jihad, and those under its authority regard their leader as Amir-ul-Mu’mineen.
The Taliban rules an area approximately 4 times the size of the area controlled by Daa’sh, and it enjoys significantly broader and deeper levels of support from the population. The territory under Taliban control is tremendously rich in minerals and natural gas, estimated to be worth trillions of dollars; more than enough to make Afghanistan a prosperous and developed country. Instead, Afghanistan is the 16th poorest country in the world, and the 5th least developed.
The prospects for Afghanistan to benefit from its resources and to achieve economic sovereignty and independence are, to put it lightly, bleak. Income from ghanimah and zakat have not led to economic viability nor the power to dictate terms of trade and investment.
In the late 1990s, I was among those ready to give my bay’ah to Mullah ‘Umar, just as many brothers today are enthusiastic about the “Islamic State”. This experiment has been tried before, and its current incarnation in Bilad ash-Sham has fewer variables conducive for success than the original attempt in Afghanistan.
The priority should be to develop actual economic sovereignty and a mechanism for interacting with the global system in a way that preserves our independence. Continuous war and strife, which is what expansionist land grabbing means, is not a recipe for development and stability for our people; it is a formula for chaos and self-destruction.